Justifying Our Existence: An Essay in Applied Phenomenology by Graeme Nicholson (review)

Justifying Our Existence is an excellent and rare sort of book. In it Graeme Nicholson applies insights, hard won from long study of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, to show how very familiar human phenomena point to deep existential issues. He thus brings Heidegger’s rather daunting book down to earth in sharp, compelling, and lucid language. Justifying Our Existence is also a philosophical work in its own right, with deep wisdom about life.

Aristotle long ago observed that while some things are pursued for the sake of others (e.g. money as the means for some further benefit), some things are pursued for their own sake. Happiness is one such thing. But for Aristotle, happiness, eudaimonia, is not a fleeting emotion; it is a long-term state of living life well to realize the proper excellence of a human being. For Aristotle, this excellence was a self-evident feature of human nature and political life. We moderns, though, do not encounter any such self-evident answer as to what our life is for. Nonetheless, at the heart of life, we realize there is something that would answer to our calling, something it is given us to be, for which there is no further purpose and without which our other purposes have no real meaning. We experience this in life even before reflecting on it. Our lives are thus shaped by caring for an answer to the question of what we are to be. Paradoxically, though, if we already had an answer to our question, we could not care in this way. We are each an unanswered question.

Yet this does not mean that we do not answer to something. Nicholson’s insight, building on Heidegger, is that we answer to our own existence. More precisely, our existence characteristically exhibits a self-answering structure. Nicholson sheds new light on this by describing this structure as manifest in two sorts of phenomena: magnifying our existence and justifying our existence. To magnify our existence is to be concerned with doing better at what already concerns us. This is a pervasive human phenomenon, and Nicholson studies it in detail (in part through a remarkable discussion of Lee Iacocca!) to show that our lives are not geared to a fixed end, but to advancing what we are to be. But this leaves open the question of what we should get better at being. Magnifying our existence tends to empty out this question by pursuing a betterment that does not really engage the question what our lives are to be. As Nicholson shows, this leads to an experience of justifying our existence that directly engages the ‘to be’ question by responding to challenges to the ‘to be’ we have heretofore pursued.

Crucially, justifying our existence calls on us to respond to something other than ourselves that challenges us to find a resource for response from within ourselves. Yet our own resource is precisely what is being challenged, as when we are called on to justify ourselves. We fail to justify our existence if we do not address the challenge, or if we respond without admitting any fault in our own selves or efforts to justify ourselves. A certain dimension of admission or shame is required. In four central chapters, Nicholson studies phenomena of magnifying and justifying our existence on the level of both the self and community and shows how these interweave in a grand rhythm or structure of life. But we ourselves cannot fulfill our self-answering, so we live out this movement in a broader, spiritual community, as Nicholson discusses in the penultimate chapter, which has more Hegelian and Kierkegaardian echoes.

Altogether this is a deeply thoughtful and illuminating book for our times that reinvigorates and deepens the project of existential and phenomenological philosophy. It is notable for its powerfully clear language and engagement with contemporary life, literature, politics, and issues. It is a great book for any thoughtful person who wakes up with...