Existentialism and the Abyss of Non-existence
By Edwin L. Young, PhD
December 16, 2006

Yes, it is shocking and chilling. It is buried deep in every human and drives them repress their primal fear of 'not being'. No abyss, no religion! This is why existentialism has such meaning for those few who let themselves face it. Paradoxically, it is when one faces one's ultimate aloneness that we are transformed from having perpetual fear of being alone, perpetual rushing away from it, and perpetual desperate need for people to having acceptance of aloneness as the universal human condition. We are transformed into having a deep appreciation for, empathy for, and love of all of our fellow human beings in all their variegated forms and ways of being. We are all in this condition of existence together.

This is what Miguel de Unomuno called the "The Tragic Sense of Life". The denial of ultimate aloneness, the denial of death, is the underlying reason for daredevils and cloistered holy people alike. It is what Kierkegaard called the "Sickness unto Death", Tillich wrote about in "Courage to Be", Heidegger wrote about in "Being and Non-Being", and Sartre in "Being and Nothingness". It is, as all existentialists proclaim, the source of ultimate freedom, the agony of awareness of ultimate freedom of choice, and the poignancy of "intentional consciousness". Stay with it, explore it, embrace it, and discover a new and profound gratitude for being alive and "Reverence for Life" as Schweitzer wrote. Learn to accept the unyielding uncertainty of reality and our profound lack of control over existence, yet the freedom to be and 'to not have to' be, do, or have that our universal condition put us in. Here, we learn to trust ourselves and to trust in the possibility of intelligent spontaneity and the capacity to accept and cope with the ever-changing reality that this human condition presents. You can do and be this when you accept the abyss and the inevitability of our essential nothingness and the possibility of ultimately not being. What a great love of and gratefulness for each 'moment' of being alive comes when we accept it as a temporary gift.

In the paragraph above, I said, "buried deep in every human". I should change that from "every human" to all humans except for the profoundly retarded or the equivalent among the severely brain damaged. Neither does it apply to infants and very young children who have not reached the stage at which they are aware that they could die or cease to exist, that is to say, cease to 'be'. To know you could cease to be alive and to face the inevitability of dying is common to almost everyone, while the acknowledging and experiencing the real possibility of 'not being', permanently and forever, is rare.

Some people feel painfully alone even in the midst of live, friendly people. They may feel they do not exist for those people. They may even wish they did not exist or that they had never been born. Yet these people usually do not feel that they could or wish they could cease exist totally and forever. The experience or awareness of eternal non-being occurs to only those few humans who have had the psychological sophistication and maturity to experience the feeling of possible not being.

Some people transcend to that level of sophistication when they face their essential aloneness in the world. They come to the realization that, regardless of whether they have friends and relatives, they, at any time, can be in the position of facing a crisis and there is no one to turn to but themselves. They can imagine being in a chilling situation of facing eminent death and no one it there to be with them. They can imagine dying and still having awareness yet being forever totally alone, as though floating forever lost in a universe of complete blackness. Such experiences or realizations can occur with people who have suffered a terrifying instance of abandonment, usually in early life, or who have experienced it accompanying the immediacy of the death of someone who made one feel they were not vulnerable to being psychologically, or existentially, totally, alone.

There are people with great psychological sophistication who have contemplated the nature of human existence and the universe and have realized that it could all end, all of it forever ceasing to exist, with no one even to witness it and record that once there was life and once was a planet with its amazing, living beings. Facing the significance of such experiential awareness for one's existence, or state of contingently being alive, and allowing that moment to be transformational, to allow it to result in revising one's way of being in the world means that the nature of existence of self and life and the universe has become finite. That eerie, chilling, moment will, in almost all cases, result in causing a person to feel the enormous preciousness of life, of having had the privilege of being alive and aware of it.

Reflecting further about death and despair over non-being, I realized the difficulty that people have of reckoning with the acceptance of reality: the reality of basic aloneness in the world, pain, suffering, disappointment, un-fulfillment, tragedy, inhumanity, grotesqueness, and the like. When we acknowledge our basic vulnerability; the fickleness of fate; our death and its possibility of coming at any moment; when we acknowledge our physical frailty and emotional pain; when we acknowledge the impossibility of fulfillment of our dreams; when we acknowledge our basic lack of control over reality, what are we left with? We are left staring into the abyss. We are left with a realization that our self, our identity that we guard so vigilantly, is nothing more than an ephemeral idea, a tenuous and evanescent thought in a decaying mortal brain, a momentary label largely dependent upon our external kaleidoscopic world. In short, we are faced with our fundamental nothingness and emptiness. Humans with a minimal cognitive capacity first begin to get this realization thrust upon them at some point in childhood. Our reaction to this horror is to experience an icy dread. Next, there is an immediate rush to whatever and whoever will disconfirm the horror and validate our permanent existence and identity. Some of us, as we mature, begin to realize that reality is real and that our wish for it to be different, and our hope that the props we try to cling to will cover the abyss, are all illusions. At that point, these fortunate, or unfortunate, few who cannot avert their gaze from the abyss begin to experience despair. The choices for them become whether to wallow in the despair, take mood-altering drugs, or wrestle with this defining challenge to their existence. The latter choice is genuinely and unflinchingly to wrestle with the challenge of the abyss; with the reality of our pain; with our finiteness, or to run from it. If we begin uncompromisingly to accept our condition as a human being, then there comes a dawning awareness that in accepting our aloneness, we are accepting this as the fundamental condition of all humanity.

Paradoxically, this acceptance means we are not alone in our aloneness; we are not unique in our experience of pain and un-fulfillment. When we realize that all of humanity exists under these same conditions, we can identify with this as the basic existential condition of all humans. We no longer avert our eyes. We no longer deny our pain. We no longer protest that our identity and ourselves are indestructible. We open ourselves, not only to the presence of this condition in all humans, but also, to the near universal desire to avoid its acknowledgement as well. We do not avoid and deny our experience and we no longer avoid, deny, or camouflage the experience in others. We can see and feel their pain just as they do. We can also understand and accept their powerful drive to avoid facing it. Moreover, just as we now 'let it be' in ourselves, we can 'let it be' in others, whether that means facing or running. We have the kind of immediate, unvarnished empathy that infants in adjoining cribs exhibit when they all begin to cry as any one of them does; only we do this in a far more complex and adult manner. From this point on, we begin to accept more and more of reality until we identify with the whole earth and all of its living beings and inert systems and finally with the mortality of the universe. It is not likely that, from that point on, we can turn our backs on any part of existence. When we perceive existence and people with this kind of immediacy of empathy, we respect the rights of all humans to their freedom of self-determination or freedom of will, and all beings to the existence most natural to their own nature. We take the same posture toward both the organic and the inorganic world with their right to be respected and unspoiled by us, as well. We are pro-existence, after we have accepted reality as it is. We identify with and want what is best and most natural for all of existence.