4. Who Knows What "Existential" Means?

In all the uses of the word "existential" I have found in the New York Times in the last fifty years, there's only one I'm sure I understand, Yossi Klein Halevi's reference to the "existential threat" Israel sees coming from its Arab enemies. They want to end its existence. Perfectly clear. The one furthest from my understanding is probably Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's reference to the "existential rage" of contemporary women. I understand rage but what's existential? In between those two are, God help me, existential challenges, struggles, crises, bafflements, loathings, doubts, anxieties, themes, predicaments, puzzles, and paradoxes. When I add in a search of the New York Review I've got existential needs, searchings, raptures, significances, journeys, realities, gambles, alternatives, complexities, and failures. Nothing is clear.

Maybe, friend, that's because you've failed to take the first Wikipedian step, disambiguation. "Existential" can refer either to the Israeli problem or to the universal human problem conceived in the philosophy called Existentialism. Study of that philosophy would make a lot of those words clear. I have done that and I will, if you'll excuse me, tell you what an "existential challenge" is. It's the challenge in this question: "Do you see yourself making your next choice as a creature whose essence, determined by God and eternally fixed in that creature's heavenly existence as a soul, is to use his reason to choose what's right, or do you see yourself making your choice as a creature who, with no God to determine it, has no essence, but must himself determine what he is through the choices of right and wrong he makes in his earthly existence?" That's "existential" in Jean-Paul Sartre's version of the philosophy. The word tells you that you alone, as you exist right now, in a universe without God, determine what you are.

I'm afraid you've lost touch with what's happened to the word. I can see that yes, to understand some of those meanings I'll have to do some study, and I can see how at the end of my study I will probably understand "existential anxiety" (decisions like that would certainly worry me) and "existential crisis" (could be a big choice) and "struggle" (it will always be hard) and "doubt" (I'll seldom be sure I'm right), but what does that do for me when I have Walter Kaufman telling me (NYR, 10-14-10) that certain art objects confer an "existential significance on history." Can history cease to exist? Does it make agonized choices?

All right, I'll admit that some uses now are a little odd.

A little? Do you know that, according to the Times and the New York Review, there are now existential consumers, outcasts, clowns, loners, sorcerers, tourists, air pockets, martyrs, and orgasms? There's even an existential insurance policy, and it's not life insurance.

Where's that? Oh yes, Annie Murphy Paul, in the Times last month: "For a preschool girl, a Cinderella dress is nothing less than an existential insurance policy, a crinolined bulwark to fortify a still-shaky sense of identity." There you've got to use your imagination a little. The policy is existential because it helps meet the challenge in Sartre's question, "Who are you going to be?" The dress says, for a still uncertain girl, "I am going to be a woman."

OK, by extension an "existential crisis" is an identity crisis. But what is an "existential fantasy" and how can there be "existential loathing" and what in the world is an "existential rapture"?

I have to say that I don't know. But since words both have meanings and send off signals there are always going to be some people who use them for the signals. I think that's what's being done with those words. Many words that come from philosophy will simply signal "deep."

Ah yes, those orgasms are going to be deep. But I don't find other philosophers' words in the Times index signaling "deep" about so many ordinary things. Why this one?

I think the other ones mainly signal impersonal logical and linguistic analysis. Something hard to do and far from life. "Existential" signals a personal stand on big issues, like the existence of God. It isn't easy but it's close to life.

And particularly close to the cool life in Paris cafes. Signaled with just one word. How many lazy students did we have after the war playing Sartre in Midwestern beer joints? Plumage in the mating dance, that's all "existential" added.

I'll admit that, but it's not Sartre's fault, and it says little about existentialism. Every attractive contribution in philosophy gets played for a while in that game. You could probably hear "categorical imperative" thrown around just as often in Heidelberg. But that's just froth in the mug. There can be good beer underneath.

And how will I ever know that it's there, and good? Has to be by impersonal analysis, ignoring all the signals. If you're a follower of Socrates you blow away froth. I hate getting my nose in it.

You can blow it away, but you know what? You're going to lose a lot of the fun. You'll miss the sport in "existential diminuendo" (man, those violins were really sawing during the existential crisis) and "existential menopause" (for a guy caught between youthful ambition and elderly failure) and in seeing Robinson Crusoe as "a hero of French logic gone to existential seed." You'll never enjoy watching a pitcher like Mark Fidrych as "an existential experience" or take Reinhold Messner's climbing a mountain, looking for "the world's highest therapy couch," to be an example of "existential consumerism." You'll be missing a lot.