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Emptiness is an existential response to the human condition. It’s our search for personal meaning in the face of finite existence, as explained by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm:
[Man’s] awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison.
Existential emptiness has been described by James Park as “an incompleteness of being,” beyond the reach of love and “more profound than all forms of interpersonal loneliness.” It’s the recognition that we’re all that is, without hope or meaning or anything to cling to. We conclude that there is no ultimate significance or importance to life.
Because existential emptiness doesn’t yearn for anything specific, it doesn’t go away by fulfilling our desires. It can be all pervasive or suddenly there, but not necessarily in response to an external event. Both loneliness and emptiness are aspects of the same basic anxiety, which is often felt as we near the discomfort of these states. It’s the fear of experiencing emptiness that manifests as existential anxiety―an ever-present, anxious dread that even lurks beneath happiness, according to the first existentialist Soren Kierkegaard.
Existentialism
Existentialism was named by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. It grew out of the nihilism and alienation fostered in a Godless, meaningless society after World War. Sartre viewed existential emptiness as a consequence of social alienation and spiritual bankruptcy, caused by a lack of meaning and purpose in our relationship to life. He argued that “existence precedes essence,” proposing that it’s up to each individual to give life meaning. His views were expressed by many philosophers, writers, filmmakers, and artists, including Martin Heidegger, Rollo May, Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemmingway, T.S. Elliot, and Edward Hopper.
Existentialists maintained that despite seeming to have everything, people were entertained by propaganda, marketing, and the media, but led shallow, discontented lives, alienated from nature, others, and their authentic self. They were avoiding the anguish of facing that their lives were empty, without an afterlife, meaning, or value. Albert Camus vividly portrayed this in The Stranger, depicting an absurd universe without hope or illusion, which is described by a man deeply alienated, due to the split between himself and his life the actor and his setting.
Theistic existentialists argued that this emptiness reflected religious poverty that’s not often felt by people “too busy to feel much absence of any kind,” unless they’re shocked into reassessing their lives and sense of meaning by a sudden painful experience [8]. But when it afflicts those who “have it all,” the question arises, what’s the point of existence?
Contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel points out that we live our lives from a subjective point-of-view, meaning that we place importance on what affects us personally―the most dreaded being the reality of our eventual death, decay, and nonexistence, which we can barely imagine. Yet the earth is only a pale blue dot when viewed from a distance. Nagel states that in contrast to our everyday subjective view, when we take a broader, objective perspective, our daily concerns and the things we value most, even our individual existence, have no significance.
Nagel considers that the probability of our conception (and that of our parents and their ancestors), which gave rise to our unique being, was so precarious and fortuitous that its possibility might have perished along with the millions of sperm that didn’t make it on the long journey to fertilize our mother’s waiting egg. Meanwhile, life on earth would have continued without us and will continue after we die.
Contemplating this in its extreme deprives human life of all meaning to the point of absurdity, as depicted in The Stranger. We become detached observers, where nothing matters. Our dilemma becomes how to live both engaged and detached without denying either viewpoint. Read about psychological emptiness.
© 2019 Darlene Lancer, LMFT
Author of
Codependency for Dummies