Abandonment (existentialism)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Abandonment, in the existentialist tradition, names something precise and unsettling: the condition of humanity existing without a god who created it with a purpose. Not loss, not grief, not the feeling of being left behind by someone who once cared. A philosophical position. A logical consequence. If there is no creator, then there is no pre-given human nature. If there is no pre-given human nature, then every person arrives in the world without instructions, without a role assigned in advance, without an author.

  Jean-Paul Sartre made this explicit in his 1946 lecture L'Existentialisme est un humanisme. When he used the word "abandonment," he was borrowing a term Heidegger had already favored, and he was careful to say that it meant only one thing: God does not exist, and the consequences of that absence must be followed all the way to the end.

  What those consequences are, how different thinkers traced them, and why the concept divides even people who reject religious belief entirely are questions this documentary will work through. Because abandonment is not a single idea but a crossroads where atheism, anxiety, authenticity, and the meaning of modern life all meet.

• 2. Three Schools, One Fork

  ›

  Sartre mapped the intellectual landscape into three distinct positions, each answering the same question differently: does a creator determine what a human being is?

  The first position is straightforward Christian belief. God exists, creates people actively, and does so with a purpose in mind. Without that purpose, according to this view, humanity defaults to its own worst nature. A world stripped of divinely accorded meaning devolves into anarchy.

  The second position, Christian existentialism, grants the individual the power to create meaning. But that creation happens within a framework. The search for union with God shapes the struggle, and it is that struggle itself, not its resolution, that defines who a person is.

  The third position is what Sartre called atheist existentialism. Here there is no creator at all. The phrase he reaches for is "there is no human nature." The "human reality" is not shared but subjective, particular to each person's journey. Existence comes before the development of what that existence means.

  Sartre traced his own lineage back to Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, calling them the supposed originators of existentialist thought. Both were gripped by the singularity of existence and the priority of existence over essence. But neither of them took the step of arguing that God never existed and therefore never controlled individual will. That step belonged to Sartre and to Martin Heidegger, and it is what gives abandonment its specific weight.

• 3. Heidegger's Darker Turn

  ›

  Martin Heidegger reached the concept of abandonment by a different route than Sartre, drawing directly on Nietzsche's work rather than on the atheism debate.

  Heidegger's version was not abandonment by God but the abandonment of being. He theorized that this abandonment causes what he called "the distress of lack of distress." A person's distress, in his framework, is not something to escape. It is the opening of the mind to the truth of existence, specifically the truth that existence is without inherent meaning. The truest state of a person, in which being comes before meaning, is also a state of extreme distress.

  Heidegger also linked this to historical diagnosis. He located the abandonment of being in what he called the darkness of the world in modern times and what he described as the derangement of the West. The death of the moral, an echo of Nietzsche, was part of this picture.

  Heidegger identified three forces that conceal the abandonment of being and prevent people from confronting it honestly. The first he called calculation: the placement of total faith in scientific data, which functions, in his view, as a structural parallel to belief in God. The second he called acceleration: a mania for the technologically new that sweeps people away into the quantitative enhancement of status. The third he called the outbreak of massiveness: the way the rare and singular quality of genuine abandonment is overwhelmed by the common beliefs and moral identities shared by crowds. Each concealment, for Heidegger, marks an epoch in the historical search for being.

• 4. Abandonment and Atheism

  ›

  Sartre described abandonment as the logical derivative of atheism, but the connection cuts in both directions.

  In the United States Supreme Court case Murray v. Curlett, the case that removed Bible reading and recitation of the Lord's Prayer from public schools, the petitioners defined their atheism in terms that track closely with existentialist abandonment. Their statement runs in part: "An atheist loves his fellow man instead of god. An atheist believes that heaven is something for which we should work now, here on earth for all men together to enjoy."

  The statement continues that an atheist finds no help through prayer but must locate in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it, and enjoy it. He seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a god. A hospital, in this formulation, should be built instead of a church; a deed done instead of a prayer said.

  Sartre associated this foundational orientation with a wider set of thinkers: Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Noam Chomsky. The claim they all share is that ethical behavior, regardless of the practitioner, results from the same causes and is regulated by the same forces. Religious belief, in this reading, plays no role in producing or regulating moral conduct. Belief in a higher power is therefore unnecessary when one understands that humans carry no original purpose assigned from outside themselves.

• 5. Existence Before Essence

  ›

  The philosophical move that makes abandonment coherent is captured in a single phrase that existentialism took as its foundation: existence precedes essence.

  To exist, in this framework, is precisely to constitute one's own identity. That identity is determined neither by nature nor by culture. It is something each person makes through freedom, choice, and commitment. The concept of authenticity, introduced as the norm of self-identity, ties directly to this: the self that is genuinely one's own is the self one has freely constructed, not one inherited from a tradition or assigned by a creator.

  Original existentialism, as a school, framed its concerns through several overlapping lenses. Anxiety, death, and nihilism were among its central preoccupations. So was the rejection of science and especially causal explanation as a sufficient framework for understanding human life. Science can tell you how things happen; it cannot tell you what it means to be the person to whom they are happening.

  Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, though they constrained their theories to theological systems, were already working within the idea that existence comes before essence. What they did not argue was that God had simply never existed. That gap, once filled by Sartre and Heidegger, is where abandonment as a specific concept takes hold. The disownment of the surety of being, as Heidegger framed it, is more useful than any comfortable certainty. It is the magnitude of the non-form, as he put it, that reveals what he considered the truth of life.