Existentialism

Existentialism is a modern philosophical position that has its roots in the 19th-and 20th-century writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These writings share a general concern to reject systematic forms of reasoning and behavior in favor of individual expression and action.

Existentialism argues that although the human system of perception and cognition enables people to reason and reflect and marks them out as distinct from all other animals, the manifold experiences that each person goes through ensure that his or her personality remains unique. In this sense of the term, people create their own nature. Moreover, this nature will continue to change as time wears on and other contexts are experienced. The term existence, then, refers to this continual re-creation of the self through experience.

This existence is, however, fraught with anxiety and even dread. This is because people, it is argued, long for some kind of external or independent confirmation that the choices they make in life are indeed the right ones. In the absence of just such a confirmation, there is a feeling of what Sartre called “nausea,” that is, the recognition of the fundamental lack of order to the universe. In a similar vein, Heidegger referred to the “anguish” that people feel when they realize that at each moment there is no overarching set of rules as to how they should proceed to live as humans; instead, there is a range of choices that can be made. Indeed, a common reference point in existential thought is this notion of freedom in that people will always have the opportunity, but also the responsibility, to choose their actions. Even the decision not to choose is itself a choice.

This philosophical position has major implications for academic analysis in which research questions are posed and methods of data collection and analysis are chosen. It follows that because each choice has been made by an individual with his or her own unique personality, no one else can truly comprehend the reasoning behind a particular decision, nor can they grasp the impact of that decision on other people. Hence, one cannot be an existentialist and claim to “explain” social events. One can, however, attempt to empathize with the experiences of another person. In this way, analysis becomes more of a dialogue with others than an objective series of hypotheses and observations.

Although existentialism can be traced back to the 19th century, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that humanistic geographers began to engage with this body of thought. Not all of humanist geographic inquiry follows an existentialist path, yet the[Page 144] emphasis on the everyday, often mundane experiences of people has had a significant impact. The notion of intersubjectivity, for example, draws in large part from the empathic understanding of the experiences of others. This has been used by humanistic geographers to delve into the world of otherwise marginalized groups, including the elderly and children, using indepth ethnographic methods. Moreover, the notion of reflexivity, which now cuts across the field of human geography more broadly, underscores the conviction that an explicitly subjective understanding of a situation by someone experiencing it is actually preferable to that of someone claiming to be a detached objective observer.

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