On Existentialism (Column 140)

With God’s help

Since lately I have been asked several times (see, for example, here, here and here) about existentialism, what it is and what I think of it, I thought I would devote a column to it (even though this is one column more than it deserves). Maimonides already taught that even negative attributes teach us something. Thus, explaining why studying Hasidism or the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is not Torah study (at least not high-quality Torah study) is itself Torah study. And similarly, explaining why existentialism is not philosophy also teaches us something about philosophy.[1] So one may recite the blessing over Torah study on this column, which cannot be done for the study of Sartre or Buber.

The definition of existentialism

Existentialism (literally: existential philosophy) is a movement in philosophy that developed at the beginning of the twentieth century as a reaction to the great theoretical, speculative, and abstract philosophies, chiefly those of Kant and Hegel. Whereas those dealt with metaphysical abstractions about the world and our perception of it, the existentialists preferred to deal with insights that arise from the individual person and his experiences. Instead of metaphysical and general speculations about the world, they try to hew insights out of themselves, out of the personal, out of life itself. Sometimes they contemplate life, but the truly meticulous simply live and experience it (which is why part of existentialism seems to me to stand on the verge of meditation).

In Wikipedia, under the entry ‘Existentialism,’ it is defined as follows:

Existentialism (from the term commonly used by the philosopher Kierkegaard in Danish: existents-forhold) or existential philosophy, is an approach according to which philosophy begins with the individual person—living, feeling, and acting. The main topics that occupy existentialist thinkers are the absurd, free will, meaning of life and existential loneliness. This movement extends from the end of the 19th century to the 20th century, and its central thinkers are: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In his lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre argued that existentialism is the idea that "existence precedes essence," that is, a person first exists, and only afterward acquires significance.

The existentialist rebellion accompanied, alongside it, positivism, which also opposed the grand metaphysical claims, and even preceded and helped generate the postmodern rebellion. These three currents all reject engagement with large, objective truths, and the first and third, each in its own way, prefer the personal and experiential. The second (positivism) reduces philosophy to things that can be clearly defined and directly measured. Apparently the opposite, but in fact the other side of the same coin.

Existentialism and Hasidism

Were I not afraid to say so, I would add that the study of Hasidism in many cases distills and combines, in optimal form, the worst in all three of these approaches. Although it is based to a large extent on kabbalistic-metaphysical speculation, it tries to transpose it to the psychological-existential plane. Hence the author of the Leshem, the well-known kabbalist of the early twentieth century, determined that the study of Hasidism is not the study of Kabbalah. When one studies Kabbalah, he writes, one deals with the upper worlds. Hasidism (as well as other kabbalists who see Kabbalah as a parable for the powers of the soul or for various things in our world), by contrast, deals with the human being and our world (doing so in kabbalistic language and with a kabbalistic conceptual system), and not with the upper worlds, and therefore it cannot be considered engagement in Kabbalah.

Similarly, I argue that existentialist philosophy is not philosophy. This is not the place to elaborate on the definition of philosophy, and so I will say only briefly that philosophy deals with the world and with our cognition of it. Philosophy is always situated one plane below the field of knowledge with which it deals. Philosophy of science deals with the way science is conducted and with its meaning (and not with the scientific facts and theories themselves). The philosophy of aesthetics or ethics likewise deals mainly with methods for analyzing and formulating positions in those fields. Political philosophy, as distinct from political science (careful: an empty term), deals with the methodology and meaning of the various ideas in the field of political science (and with judging them, unlike science, which is supposed to deal with description)[2]. The field that is for some reason called "existentialist philosophy" deals with experience, or with a collection of psychological insights, but that is not engagement with any meta-domain, and therefore it is not philosophy. Below I will clarify this further.

Existentialism: method and contents

The distinctiveness of existentialism lies mainly on two planes: 1. the subjects with which it deals (loneliness, alienation, suffering, the desire to die or to live, and so on). 2. the method (hewing insights out of experience and personal biography). One can see on both these planes that this is not philosophy. The method is not philosophical (what validity do experiences have with respect to facts about the world?), and the subjects are psychological, not philosophical.

It is important here to clarify a point about which I was also asked on the site. Every philosophy is based on the intuitions of the thinker, and in that sense there is a personal dimension in every philosophical doctrine. But in ordinary philosophy intuition plays the role of a tool for acquiring basic apprehensions of the world.[3] If existentialism claimed that one should use intuitions, it would add nothing new. There would be nothing distinctive about that. But existentialism does not rely on intuitions about the world, because it does not deal with the world. It relies on existential experiences (and not on intuitive apprehensions), and from within them it deals with the human being, his experiences, and their meaning. Therefore it is really a branch of psychology, except that unlike scientific psychology (to the extent that there is such a thing; in my opinion, not really), which is supposed to deal with describing facts and building theories that explain them, existentialism speaks about the subjective meaning of things. But meaning in what sense? By what does one determine whether the meaning is this or that? Meanings that a person constitutes for himself are a subjective matter. What philosophical importance do they have, and why are they related to philosophy at all?

Victor Frankl, for example, built a psychological doctrine (logotherapy) in which, within the therapeutic process, a person constructs and finds subjective meaning for his life, and thus is saved. Is that philosophy too? This is a psychological technique, and it should be examined as such. Anyone who comes to examine whether the meaning I built for myself, under the therapeutic guidance of the venerable Victor, in order to cope with the difficulties I experienced inside Auschwitz, is valid, correct, reliable, or passes any tests whatsoever, simply does not understand the medium. The only thing he can examine is whether it works—that is, whether it helps me heal and function. That is precisely what psychology means. If what helped me were seeing myself as Napoleon, then Frankl would recommend that I do it. Does that mean I am Napoleon? Is there any point now in going to a historian and checking whether Napoleon was indeed really called Michael Abraham? (It was not Napoleon but his cousin, who was also called Napoleon.) By the same token, an existentialist thesis cannot be examined in terms of true or false. It is a framework a person constructs for himself, within which his experiences and his life are interpreted. In fact, this is literally logotherapy. To examine such an insight in terms of true and false is a misunderstanding, and therefore I cannot see how one can regard such insights as philosophy. At most one can find there psychological insights or subjective interpretation, and these should be examined in terms of therapeutic utility, not in terms of truth or falsehood. In fact, this is literature more than philosophy (see the short list of thinkers brought above, and you will notice that a considerable portion of the existentialist thinkers are writers and not philosophers)[4].

Existentialism and postmodernity

Within postmodern discourse, it is very convenient for such a phenomenon to demand for itself, and receive, the status of philosophy, for our postmodern cousins claim that every meaning is subjective and that there are really no objective meanings. The more extreme among them say this even about science. If so, why should the existentialist hallucinations be denied their share within the universal circle of hallucinations?! And indeed, if nothing has any meaning, then every meaning is equal to every other, however subjective it may be. But philosophy assumes that things in the world do have meanings and interpretations, and that these can be discovered by philosophical tools. Within this sane and rational discourse, existentialism is not philosophy. One can, of course, object to philosophy and claim that it is empty, speculative verbiage. But that does not turn existentialism into philosophy.

It is important to note that one can sometimes find philosophical insights in books regarded as existentialist, but then those are ordinary philosophical insights and not existentialism. Sometimes you may also find there a recipe for cake, but that too is not philosophy and perhaps not existentialism either. Insofar as these are existentialist insights, which are supposed to be the main point of such a work, they will not be philosophy.

To sharpen the point, let us now consider a few examples.

Loneliness, freedom, suffering, dread, alienation, and absurdity[5]

All the words in the heading (and a few more like them) are discussed at very great length in existentialist literature. You will find there statements like: loneliness characterizes the modern human being. It is accompanied by dread, and it is strange and unique, and one cannot share it with anyone else. This is a psychological description (in my view, shallow and rather elementary in most cases), which is not accompanied by even minimal quantification (how much dread? Is this more widespread or deeper than in previous periods?) and does not even clearly define its concepts, so it is obvious that it cannot be subjected to an empirical test. So there is not even real psychology here. It is a kind of poem or prose that perhaps arouses certain feelings in the reader. In terms of the columns on poetry and on Hasidism, one may say that this is a philosophical telephone pole, that is, something that perhaps arouses thoughts and insights in us, just as contemplating a telephone pole might. But the feelings that are aroused in the reader are his own responsibility. There is no learning something from the author here, and above all there is no philosophical content whatsoever in the text itself (just as the telephone pole has no content, even if contemplating it brought me to lofty philosophical attainments).

As another example, take the following collection of statements (from Wikipedia, there):

The dread is a natural response to life in a world without meaning and without purpose, into which the human being has been thrown without having chosen it and in which he is "condemned to live." From this world he is destined to part in a violent way, in death, without understanding what any of this was about. The alienation present in modern society intensifies these reactions among those who live in it. According to existentialism, the human being is like a cog in a machine, enveloped in despair and panic before the machine’s power on the one hand, and before his own weakness on the other.

This is a collection of statements that lies somewhere between psychological description (worth a penny) and vague claims that do not really say anything. The human being is likened to a despairing cog facing the machine and his own weakness. What in the world does all this mean? And what exactly have we learned from it? A nice metaphor (or a less nice one)? At most, this is literature (worth half a penny).

Take even Sartre’s slogan, which is considered an existentialist classic, that existence precedes essence. What in the world does that mean? “Precedes” in what sense? Does he mean to say that the grand speculations do not interest him, and that he prefers to occupy himself with his experiences? Fine, good health to him. I am not interested in swimming in the sea either. So what? That is merely a matter of taste. Or did he mean to say that experience is a better instrument of truth than speculative thought? What is the basis for that claim? Has anyone put it to any test? And in general, in what sense is the concept of “truth” being used here? Is it in the same sense as usual? I don’t think so.

And what about ordinary philosophy?

All of these are statements that for some reason sound very profound to many of us, but in fact they are a collection of vague sentences that scarcely deserve the title of claim. There is certainly no philosophy here. In fairness, I must say that sizeable parts of ordinary philosophy (especially continental philosophy) also suffer from similar defects (vagueness of concepts and claims, poor method, worthless speculation, wordplay, and so on). But that does not qualify existentialism to enter the congregation; at most it disqualifies those as well. Just as poor research in physics does not mean that playing football is doing research in physics.

By the way, there are those who say this about everything outside analytic philosophy (which is mostly Anglo-American, unlike the continentals, who in many cases simply talk nonsense). There is something to that, at least in the sense that analytic philosophy at least clearly defines its concepts and claims, but I think that is a very exaggerated statement. But there is still a very great distance between that and granting philosophical legitimacy to existentialist verbiage.

Existentialism as therapy

Here is another sentence from Wikipedia there:

Existentialism is not necessarily nihilistic and does not deal only with describing the suffering of existence. It can offer a glimmer of hope and redemption.

The subtext is that existentialism is a mode of thought with a practical purpose. It comes to help us solve psychological problems. But that is what characterizes psychology, not philosophy. Philosophy comes to clarify the truth, what is right and what is not. Whether it gives hope or sows despair does not matter at all on the philosophical plane. If the study of mathematics or physics sowed despair in the student, would we have to replace them with taking LSD pills? Philosophy strives for truth, or at least purports to do so (with varying levels of quality and success). It is judged in terms of truth or falsehood, right or wrong. Existentialism, by contrast, does not even purport to do that. It strives for therapy, that is, for practical results. In that sense it may perhaps be a branch (not usually a very successful one) of psychology, but certainly not of philosophy.

I would recall here what I said about the therapeutic value in Hasidism, and the contrast I drew there between that and study. There too I stood on the point that healing, even if it is very successful and very useful, is not study. The same applies here.

Kierkegaard: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious

Let us now take a more detailed example. Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish Christian existentialist philosopher. Among other things, he hewed out of his biography a three-stage process that the religious person is supposed to undergo:

• The first stage is the aesthetic, in which a person behaves in a natural, hedonistic manner (that is, pleasure-seeking; participating in Bacchus’s feast) and does whatever comes into his head. He simply goes with the flow.
• In the second stage, the ethical, a person acts according to ethical norms, and in effect gains control over the hedonistic tendencies that ruled him in the aesthetic stage. At this stage, you do not do everything that seems pleasant, natural, and agreeable to you; you do it only if it passes through the crucible of rational and ethical critique. The essence of Kantian morality is obedience to the categorical imperative and the overcoming of natural urges and inclinations. The conquest of impulse. There is here a demand for the sacrifice of aesthetic naturalness before, or for the sake of, ethical norms.
• In the third stage, the religious, a person sacrifices not only the aesthetic and the natural, but also the ethical. Moral and rational norms, too, bend before the religious—before the authority of God.

Kierkegaard calls the person who succeeds in reaching religious nirvana, that is, in subordinating his morality and his reason absolutely before the obligations and commandments of religion and faith, the “knight of faith.” This is the perfect servant of God. It is no wonder that the binding of Isaac, which Abraham our forefather stood ready to carry out on his son Isaac, is the archetype of such conduct. Abraham is Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, and he devotes an entire book to him, called Fear and Trembling.

Abraham our forefather, who was commanded to bind Isaac, here sacrifices his nature (the aesthetic), his reason, and his morality (the ethical), before the divine religious command. He sacrifices nature, for he is required to kill what is dearest to him—his only son. He sacrifices reason, because he has a divine promise that through Isaac shall offspring be called yours (“through Isaac shall your offspring be called”), and that obviously cannot happen if Isaac is bound and dies now. But Abraham does not even ask himself or God that question. His reason is sacrificed before the religious command. And finally, he sacrifices morality as well. This lies in killing his son, who has done no wrong, simply as a sacrifice to a capricious and domineering God who demands irrational and immoral things of him (apparently in order to test him).

But to Kierkegaard’s disappointment (and Abraham’s?), Scripture itself does not really go all the way with this thesis. At the end of the story there is the command Do not raise your hand against the boy (“do not lay your hand on the lad”). Abraham, in effect, gets the short end of the stick, for in the end God does not allow him to offer the ultimate sacrifice, which is the culmination of the religious stage. Rabbi Kook’s interpretation of the binding of Isaac (in the siddur Olat Re’iyah, at the beginning of the morning prayer) is very similar to Kierkegaard’s, except that it ends differently. Rabbi Kook specifically sees this last command as the peak of the event and its primary lesson. It becomes clear to Abraham that the Holy One, blessed be He, would never think of demanding that he sacrifice nature, reason, or morality. Abraham discovers that the commandments of the Holy One, blessed be He, are supposed to accord with nature, reason, and morality; according to Rabbi Kook, that is precisely what the binding was meant to teach.

It seems to me that Kierkegaard, by contrast, sees this command as a side closing chord to the binding story. The story really ends at the previous stage, when Abraham expresses willingness and begins to take the knife to slaughter his son. He becomes the knight of faith by virtue of the fact that he has exhausted the religious stage and sacrificed everything else before it, and now there is no need actually to kill Isaac. There is much to discuss in these interpretations (this is part of the biblical ambiguity, from which each person extracts what seems sensible to him), but here it is brought only as an example of existentialist doctrine, and so I will stop the discussion of the binding and its interpretation here.

It is worth noting that Kierkegaard identified these three stages in his personal life, and he writes that this three-stage model was hewn out of his personal biography.

Critique

Kierkegaard’s example is, in my view, the very cream of existentialist thought. He is certainly among the best of that gang, and precisely for that reason it seems to me all the more meaningful to question and examine his doctrine (all the more so with respect to other existentialist thinkers). We should ask here: why is this philosophy? To the best of my judgment, Fear and Trembling is in fact a literary work, just like the works of Dostoevsky and Camus, who, as noted, are also considered existentialist philosophers. It arouses powerful feelings, and perhaps also pours meaning into our lives, and still I find it hard to see philosophy in it.

First, in terms of method. In Fear and Trembling (and in his other works that deal with the triple movement—aesthetic, ethical, religious), Kierkegaard in effect only describes and does not argue. You will not find there an argument in favor of the movement or against it. He describes a path of human progression from hedonist to knight of faith. He also calls upon us to advance along this path and thereby express our faith and our religious commitment. Is there a philosophical claim here? By the same token, I can call on you to progress toward standing on one leg every day at a quarter past ten in the morning, and write a stirring composition on the meaning of this process. So long as I have not given reasons and have not advanced arguments in favor of my claim, what we have is a description of a theoretical move, not an argument for it. If Kierkegaard claims that this is the essence of religious obligation, namely that it overrides nature, morality, and reason, that is indeed a claim, but I have not seen reasons for it in his words. He describes a life-course of Abraham, and in the background there is a parallel course in his own life (which does not appear in Fear and Trembling). And therefore? I could describe for you the course of Stalin’s life, or President Kennedy’s. Is such a description a philosophical discussion?

Perhaps you will say that his interpretation of the binding story in the Torah is itself the argument. He shows that the Torah presents this model to us as an ideal model, that is, as the level demanded of the religious person in the service of his Creator. That itself is an argument for his thesis, since God, the author of the Torah, instructs us thus. But if so, then he is again not a philosopher but a biblical commentator. He is a philosopher in the same sense that Rashi is a philosopher, or that the author of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch was a philosopher.[6] He does not advance arguments for why something is true; at most he shows that the Holy One, blessed be He, demands it of us. That is not philosophy. Moreover, this biblical passage has quite a few other interpretations, whose conclusions are altogether different (cf. Olat Re’iyah, though that one is still fairly similar).

Nor is the correspondence to the course of his own life clear. What role does it play here? Is this parallel a philosophical argument in favor of his thesis? Why—because that is what happened to him, therefore this is the ultimate model? There you have it: existence precedes essence. But from a philosophical point of view, this is a straight naturalistic fallacy: deriving norms from facts.

I already mentioned that this recourse to personal life is a rebellion against the great speculative doctrines. Instead of going toward grand and universal truths that do not say much to us, we turn to the subjective and personal plane that touches us and our lives. But rebellion is not philosophy. Kierkegaard, like many existentialist thinkers, claims that grand doctrines and metaphysical speculations do not speak to him, or that he is not drawn to them and does not see much meaning in them, and perhaps does not believe in them either. Those are of course entirely legitimate claims. But they are expressions of personal feelings and not arguments. You are essentially expressing a different taste, not an alternative philosophical doctrine. In fact, this is not even philosophical criticism but simply the expression of personal taste. Just as if someone says, I do not like philosophy and therefore I engage in shoemaking, that does not entitle shoemaking to be considered philosophy—unless he shows me that from shoemaking he learns significant things about the world, and that this is no less significant and reliable than the ordinary philosophical tools. That is not what happens here.

On existentialism and mysticism

It is important to understand that despite everything said until now, such thought contains a tension between two components: 1. it is not based on objective arguments. 2. it is not completely subjective. The fact that many people read Kierkegaard and find meaning and value in his words shows us that there are probably insights there with some objective value. Otherwise other people, apart from Kierkegaard, would not find value and meaning in it. So in good existentialist thought there are insights that are hewn from the subjective, from the thinker’s personal life, but many find meaning in them for themselves—that is, they have something to say on the objective plane as well.

This is how Gershom Scholem defines significant mysticism. He writes that a significant mystic is not someone who simply hallucinates subjective hallucinations out of the root of his soul, for in that case he would not earn a place among other people. One who merits the status of a significant mystic is someone whose personal and subjective experiences bear meaning for many other people. That is, by means of his subjective method he has captured insights that have some objective significance.

I think good existentialist thought really is like that. People find in it something that speaks to them on their personal plane. In that sense the insights are indeed universal and objective, despite being hewn from the personal. But still, it seems to me that it is not right to see this as philosophy. The existentialist thinker describes processes and experiences, but does not argue. His effect on his readers is like that of a writer who describes things that touch them. This is not philosophy but literature. And if I return to the posts on Tanakh, on Hasidism, and on poetry, I would again say that this is not study but influence (I will mention again the example of the inspiring telephone pole). As noted, even on the methodological plane, the fact that this is inside me is not an argument and adds nothing whatsoever to validity.

What one nevertheless gets from existentialist thought, and why that is not philosophy

If, nonetheless, you do find in some existentialist work an argument in favor of a claim that is true or false, then what you have is ordinary philosophy. The fact that the thinker also finds it in his experiences or in his personal life neither adds nor detracts. As stated, the fact that I experienced something grants it no validity whatsoever. At most, it is an interesting literary anecdote, a marginal note to the philosophical argument.

And if these insights do not claim something about the world but merely “work,” that is, they efficiently help me find a way to live in a healthier and more integrated way with myself, or to find tranquility, then what we have here is a psychological-scientific finding and not philosophy. This is at most a technique for living well and being calm, but not a claim about the world. Therefore, at most, this is psychology and not philosophy.

I would add that in many cases the concepts and experiences in this thought are not clearly defined either. These are vague claims that describe feelings (toward the other, loneliness, the desire to commit suicide, and so on), and that, like works of art or literature, arouse various feelings in us, sometimes meaningful ones. This too is not study and this is not philosophy but at most inspiring literature (the telephone pole as a source of inspiration strikes again here).

On existentialism and God

It is interesting that there are quite a few existentialist thinkers, like Sartre, who, unlike Kierkegaard, who was a devout Christian, or the Jewish Buber, arrive at the conclusion that there is no God (following Nietzsche, who killed Him though He had done nothing wrong). One must remember that God is a symbol of a grand speculative metaphysical truth, precisely the thing existentialism does not like. Some existentialists turn Him into a subjective idea, and others simply give Him up. Sometimes they ask how we can know anything about Him, and what it means to say that He exists. Others claim that this has no meaning, since it does not deal with me but with the world, or in Sartre’s language, with essence and not existence. But the former are simply ordinary philosophical arguments for atheism, and the latter is a subjective statement of personal taste. The argument that the proofs for His existence are invalid, or that we have no way to know of His existence, are philosophical arguments, and as such there is certainly a need to contend with them. But what do they have to do with existentialism? These are ordinary philosophical arguments for atheism.[7] Existentialism is the alternative these thinkers created in place of religious and philosophical metaphysics—namely, hewing insights out of their existential experiences—and here we are indeed dealing with subjective truth (for me, and not for the whole world). These are doctrines and insights drawn from their personal experiences and speaking mainly to themselves. But precisely for that reason, these are not philosophies but personal experiences, or psychological insights, and they are examined through the question whether they are useful and effective (whether they “work”), and not through the question whether they are correct. Logotherapy, have we not already said?…

Summary: the context of discovery and the context of justification

Ultimately, my claim is that there really is no such creature as existentialist philosophy. Existence is at most a source of inspiration for an insight, the source from which it came to me and caused me to understand it. But the philosophical value of the insight is not connected to its source but to its content, to what it says, and even more to the reasons and arguments that justify and ground it. But those you will not find in existentialist literature (and even if you do, that is a component of ordinary philosophy and not existentialism).[8]

This may be likened to the well-known distinction in the philosophy of science between the context of discovery and the context of justification. The scientific community is not interested in how some scientist arrived at his theory. That is the context of discovery, and as far as we are concerned he could have received it through a revelation from Elijah or from his grandmother appearing to him in a dream. What determines things on the scientific plane is the context of justification—that is, whether it is true (in the scientific case: whether it withstands empirical tests). The same applies to the philosophical context. There too the context of discovery is really not important. The fact that someone drew this or that insight from the depths of his soul and his experiences is really unimportant. What matters is whether that insight is true or not. That must be examined on its own merits using the tools of reason and philosophy. If it stands up to such examination, then we are dealing with an ordinary philosophical theory, and its existential source is quite marginal to the discussion. And if it does not stand up to the test of philosophical reason, then even if you hewed it out of the depths of your bubbling being, and your whole being breaks into song when you think about it, none of that has any philosophical value.

Kierkegaard, like other existentialist thinkers, claims that there is no point in seeking objective truths. They express despair, or lack of interest and lack of purpose in philosophical inquiry. That is entirely legitimate. But what turns their alternative, which for some reason is called “subjective truth” (translated into ordinary language: hallucinations that have been found useful, at least for the hallucinator himself), into philosophy? I do not see any such thing.

[1] The use I made here of the doctrine of negative attributes is merely rhetorical. One should not infer from what I say here that the doctrine of negative attributes says anything or has any meaning. I tend to think it does not.

[2] There are fierce disputes about this among political scientists, who have difficulty drawing the line between their field and political philosophy. This is, of course, an indication of the problematic nature of defining this field as a science. The truth is that, like the rest of the bogus sciences, it has almost nothing to do with scientificity.

[3] In my books Emet Ve-lo Yatziv and Shtei Agalot I argued that intuition is a kind of cognition and not just thinking. I defined it there as “thought-recognition.”

[4] Of course, the fact that so-and-so indulges in literary writing does not necessarily mean that he is not a philosopher. But to the best of my judgment, all those listed above indeed were not philosophers. Their literature raises existentialist questions, and that is why they are mistakenly classified as philosophers. But that is just it: no, existentialism is not philosophy.

[5] One can see this, for example, in Wikipedia, s.v. ‘Existentialism’.

[6] Intentionally, I did not bring here Rabbi Akiva Eiger or Ketzot HaChoshen. In their work there is certainly a philosophical dimension.

[7] By the way, the conclusion that there is no God is an ordinary metaphysical philosophical conclusion, and nevertheless many existentialists adopt it without hesitation. This problem, of course, exists if the atheistic conclusion follows from philosophical arguments. If these fellows become atheists only because that is how they feel (subjective atheism), then this is simply not a philosophical argument but a subjective experience. I have no dispute with that whatsoever, but it is not philosophy.

[8] In my lecture on Rabbi Shagar’s book I presented a similar distinction. I said there that in postmodern writings there is a component that has meaning, except that it is not postmodern. The quality of such writings depends on the dosage of that component relative to the second component, the postmodern one, which is pure nonsense.