Question

Have a good week!
If I understand correctly, the reason the Rabbi does not like existentialism is because—even though philosophy is not based on empirical observation—it can still be apprehended with the “eyes of the intellect,” as the Rabbi puts it (actually, that expression comes from the early sages). Therefore it is not merely a psychological experience, whereas existentialism is based only on experience, and as such it belongs to psychologists, not philosophers.
But I think that is a mistake: 1. True, they describe a mental feeling, but it is based on a principled observation of the experience itself. That is, it is not just a sensory description, but a principled characterization of the “subject,” thereby turning it into an “object.” So just as the Rabbi holds that one can apprehend axioms and ideas and from there analyze conceptually and logically, so too one can analyze experience.
I think what bothers the Rabbi is not their philosophical description of the human being, but the solution they propose: that a person can create his own meaning. And here the Rabbi rightly argues that this is radical postmodern verbiage, which holds that truth and meaning are derived from the human being himself, and not from outside him. And this should be criticized just as all radical postmodernism should be criticized (which not only claims that it is impossible to reach a meta-truth, but that there is no truth at all—at least in the realm of values, but that is a separate issue), because meaning and truth derived from the human being himself are not truth and meaning, but only experiences and narratives. (Although Schopenhauer already argued that man has no meaning, unlike thinkers before him who claimed that even if meaning is not religious, it is still moral or rational and so on, and only through these is a person realized. But he presented this through an analysis of phenomena and noumena, and therefore he believed in a dual model, whereas the existentialists speak within a material world, and as such they simply contradict themselves, but that is beyond the scope here.)
2. I think that in itself existentialist philosophy has important significance, because it points out (through analytic analysis) that there is in man an essential existential contradiction. (And seemingly this itself shows that man is different from animals, and perhaps even proves that he is dual, since there is within him an essential contradiction between existence and meaning, but that too is beyond the scope here.)
Thank you very much