SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

It should be clear by now that my existence is nowhere to be found among the things
the other and I have between us and in common. If we look for a palpable point of access to
each other's existence, something to perceive, for example, we are disappointed, but that is
why we turn again and again to each other. Why we return to certain others is a separate
question. The so-called instinctual attraction between human beings that has been the focus of
so much study by psychologists (especially psychoanalysts) is secondary to our existential
encounter.
If the other looks for my existence on the visible surface of my body (the body I am), he is
disappointed. Only my eyes seem to promise admission to my existence. We will see why. Like
existential validation, the failure of each of us to make something of the other's existence is
mutual. My attempts to make something out of the other's existence are repeated. The failure is
endless, but for this very reason we again and again validate each other's existence.
We may look for a clue to what is going on in these tireless exertions in what poets and
philosophers have tried to articulate when talking about love. Understood in a certain sense,
loving is the means whereby one overcomes the inevitable failure to grasp the other's existence.
I love the other's existence, not what he is. Love prolongs the nothing between us. In love, we go
on to reestablish the things that were already there on hand between us, but now in a new
configuration. The void my existence and the other's existence, where love first takes place, is
never filled. In fact, it is held open by love. It cannot be filled, and that is why love must be
inexhaustible.
The meaning of the body of the other has a great deal to do with determining the nature
of the love, which takes on different forms: the body that is cared for in maternal love, the erotic
body of sexual love, the body valued for its own sake in filial love, and so on.
The exertion of power over an other is another means of dealing with the failure to make
something of his existence, but it is directed to what the other is and therefore to the body he
has, not to his existence and the body he is. The exercise of power over an other attempts to
control him, but control limits the other’s freedom. By contrast, validation liberates it.
Consider what happens from a different perspective. Inevitably thrown back on what I
am, in validating the existence of an other, I face the body the other is, which has now, along
with the body I am, become for us the primary things between us. The nothingness of existence
cannot be endured and we are drawn to what is closest at hand, the bodies we have. Originally
merely the means of access to each other's existence, our bodies now become the focus of our
attention. Our bodies stand between us, but not as obstacles.
The resulting experience of the validation of my existence becomes part of my past. In
this way the other becomes part of what I am. The future I am always creating out of my past
now also accommodates the other's existence, as well as what I take him to be. That is to say,
my being-consciousness that validates his existence becomes part of my past. Like any other
thing, the other’s body (the body he is) remains a mysterious place (16).
We need to probe further here. What is existence, if it is not a thing? What form does the
existence of another take in what I am, in my past and its future? (17) What form does the
existence of an other take in my experience? If I try, I cannot recollect an other's existence. If I try
to imagine it, I come up with only a fresh version of what I take the other to be, which will be
related in important ways to my future. It therefore eludes my experience, my past and its future.
How, then, do I experience the an other's existence and my validation of it?
Validating an other's existence is an instance of existing (18) through the mutuality of
existential consciousness. It is not a psychological function at all, like remembering or imagining.
It is not a modality of my being-consciousness in any sense. Since being-consciousness is always
of something and validation of a other’s existence is directed at nothing, “what” am I
consciousness of in validating an other's existence? The answer is, simply, all that the other is not.
All that the other is is absent in his existence. The content of what we will call “existential
consciousness” is this absence – nothingness. Yet again, though, we must recall that nothingness