DE Weekly: Existential Metaphysics, Phenomenology, & Acts of Consciousness
Below is an archived email originally sent on August 3, 2026.
Existential Metaphysics, Phenomenology, & Acts of Consciousness
Last week, I wrote about existential aesthetics, or what it is that makes something existential in nature––art, novels, movies, songs, and everything in between. I would like to continue the conversation about existential aesthetics in this newsletter, specifically the metaphysics that define it, and art as an expression of human freedom.
At its core, existential aesthetics means to mirror certain aspects of human experience and existence. We are thrown into the world with no inherent or apparent meaning, forced to be the authors of our own lives. How do we do it?
Existential aesthetics is premised on the fundamental considerations of the nature of reality and how human beings operate in relation to it (i.e., how we express ourselves as beings-in-the-world).
The metaphysical outlook that supports the philosophical framework of Existentialism is the radical nature of freedom––human freedom––described by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre wrote that we are “thrown” into existence without consultation, “condemned” to be free, and forced to exercise our responsibility to the Other through our choices.
The question we have to answer is: what do those choices look like?
For the existentialists, those choices are grounded in that same human freedom outlined above; our greatest possibilities lie in the deepest form of expression available to us: revealing something true about the world.
Thus, this metaphysics leads to our understanding of the existential aesthetics I described last week.
Gabriel Marcel, an existential philosopher and a Christian, understood this as a metaphysical impulse we are born with which instills us with a desire to appeal to the great “Thou,” reaching for the mystery of the Creation (God) in hopes we might access the transcendent.
Søren Kierkegaard, the father of Christian Existentialism, described a similar desire in The Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard believed that the predominating state of man is despair, and that there are two types of despair.
The first type of despair is the will to be oneself, before God. The second type of despair is not to will to be oneself (and thus, not before God).
In many ways, he and Marcel are in the same boat in this regard. But, most of the existentialists, namely, Albert Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, et al., were not religious, and so did not have these dispositions.
For them, there was no hope of accessing the transcendent, as there was no transcendent to access. Nothing we can do in this life, they would argue, is guaranteed to actually satiate our desire to find meaning in the world and yield something tangible during our time in it.
Yet, they still believed that the freedom we have to try and do so is the ultimate exercise of our ability to relate to the world, and maybe reveal some truth about it.
Theirs is certainly the prevailing belief that screams “existential aesthetics,” and that’s because a major contributor to those same aesthetics is Phenomenology, which widely informed the philosophical solutions of Existentialism.
Phenomenology focuses on the lived experience of humans and the perception of reality and the world on human consciousness to explain the way we perceive reality in itself. If this sounds a lot like Existentialism, that’s because it is; however, existentialists like Sartre developed an original approach to the aesthetics of such a world view.
In Sartre’s What is Literature?, a text all about existential aesthetics, he writes, “...it is through human reality that ‘there is’ being, or, to put it differently, that man is the means by which things are manifested.
“It is our presence in the world,” he continues, “which multiplies relations. It is we who set up this relationship between this tree and a bit of sky.
“With each of our acts, the world reveals to us a new face. But, if we know that we are directors of being, we also know that we are not its producers. If we turn away from this landscape, it will sink back into its dark permanence.”
This is exactly what I have attempted to communicate about existential aesthetics wrapped up nicely in a few sentences.
You see, for the existentialists, aesthetics with a certain meaning behind them depend on acts of consciousness, the very same acts we all have the ability to make and which defines our highest mode of relation to the world.
The aim of creating anything, it follows (art, novels, movies, songs, and everything in between), should be to exert our unique humanness in order to reveal meaningful truths about the world.
This type of aesthetic aim is inherently metaphysical, as it arises from a place only humans can perceive, experience, and understand, being what we are. For Sartre, there was a joy in “disclosing” the world in such a way.
An aesthetic reality that exists in existential aesthetics is our independence: independence not from anything, but in being independently free to choose what we can be.
Making good use of this freedom is, therefore, a foremost necessity of our condition.
“For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Newsletter #101. On our way through the next 100. Thanks for sticking with it.
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