Art and Existential Possibilities: Exploring Beyond Reality

What does art actually do? At a surface level, it depicts – a landscape, a face, a moment in time. But philosophers have long argued that art’s deepest function goes far beyond depiction. One of the most compelling answers is this: art presents existential possibilities. It does not merely show us what is, or what was, or even what could plausibly be. It brings forth the presence of possibilities – ways of existing, of feeling, of confronting life – that no empirical fact or scientific report could ever capture. This idea sits at the heart of a rich philosophical tradition that treats artworks not as copies of reality, but as imaginative projections of what human existence can mean.

What are existential possibilities? 🔗

Before examining what it means for art to embody existential possibilities, it helps to understand the term itself. Existentialism, as a philosophical movement, places individual existence, freedom, and the question of meaning at its center. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir all, in different ways, explored what it means to be a human being thrown into a world that offers no pre-given purpose. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for all these thinkers, “existence” indicates the special way in which human beings are in the world – distinctly, consciously, and with the burden of choice.

Existential possibilities, then, are the different ways a human life can be lived, confronted, or imagined. They are not blueprints or predictions. They are openings – what Heidegger called the horizon of what a human being can become. Art, in this view, gives those openings a form. It makes the possible palpable.

Art as more than representation 🔗

The traditional view of art places it in the business of representation – a painting represents a bowl of fruit, a novel represents social life, a sculpture represents the human body. But the existentialist approach challenges this. Art, on this view, is not primarily a representation of forms or essences. It is a disclosure of something that ordinary reality conceals.

Martin Heidegger developed this argument most forcefully in his essay The Origin of the Work of Art (1936). For Heidegger, art is not about aesthetics or subjective pleasure. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, Heidegger understood great artworks as helping to “establish the implicit ontology and ethics through which an historical community understands itself and its world,” insisting that “art is the becoming and happening of truth.” This truth is not scientific truth or factual correctness. It is the disclosure of how things genuinely are for existing human beings – what matters, what is at stake, what is hidden beneath the surface of everyday life.

Heidegger used the concept of aletheia – the Greek word for unconcealment – to describe this. A work of art, in his view, is a place where a world is opened and earth is set forth. The artwork does not represent a world; it opens one. And within that opened world, new existential possibilities become visible.

The temple and the shoes: Heidegger’s examples 🔗

Heidegger illustrated this with two famous examples: a Greek temple and Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes. The temple, he argued, does not merely depict Greek religious life – it gathers it, articulates it, and holds open the world of gods, mortals, earth, and sky within which the Greeks understood their existence. The temple stages a strife between world and earth – world striving to shine forth while earth resists full transparency – and this tension is the very site where a people’s self-understanding is articulated.

Van Gogh’s painting of worn shoes goes further still. The painting does not just show shoes – it discloses the entire world of the peasant woman who wears them: her labor, her fatigue, the weight of the seasons, the silent reliability of a life close to the soil. None of this is explicitly depicted. It is disclosed. The shoes open onto an existential world that no description of their physical features could access. This is art as the presentation of existential possibilities.

Sartre: imagination, freedom, and the irreal 🔗

Jean-Paul Sartre approached the same territory from a different angle. In his 1940 work The Imaginary, Sartre developed a detailed theory of how artistic experience works through the imagination rather than perception. Sartre argued that because we can imagine, we are ontologically free – a consciousness that could not imagine would be hopelessly mired in the real, incapable of perceiving unrealized possibilities and thus any real freedom of thought or choice.

For Sartre, when we engage with a work of art, we do not perceive a real object in the ordinary sense. We imaginatively constitute an irreal object – something that exists in the mode of the imaginary, not the real. The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the viewer or reader from projecting themselves into this world as if it were real. And it is precisely this imaginative projection that opens up existential possibilities. The fictional character, the painted scene, the musical phrase – none of these are real, yet through them, we encounter ways of being that are not available in our actual circumstances.

Sartre held that authenticity partly consists in shattering the images, myths, and conventional labels within which individuals enclose themselves, and that artistic creation is always open to the dimension of the “possible.” Art, for him, is an exercise of freedom – both for the artist who makes it and for the viewer who encounters it. The artist does not merely record the world; they disclose it as if it arose from human freedom, presenting it as something that could always be otherwise.

Art beyond empirical verification 🔗

One of the most philosophically significant features of art as a presentation of existential possibilities is its independence from empirical verification. A scientific claim must be testable. A historical account must be evidence-based. But art operates under different conditions entirely.

A painting or a film can trigger an epiphany and turn one’s values upside down; engaging in some aesthetic practice may give meaning to one’s existence and have a profoundly therapeutic effect. These are not effects that follow from the truth or falsity of empirical propositions. They follow from the encounter with an existential possibility – a way of seeing, feeling, or living that the artwork makes present.

This is why the philosopher Hans Maes, writing in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, argues for what he calls existential aesthetics: a branch of philosophical inquiry that investigates the various ways in which art and certain kinds of aesthetic experience can be of existential importance to people. Existential aesthetics is philosophical work that investigates the ways in which art and aesthetic practice can be of existential importance to people – encompassing not just grand epiphanies but also the everyday ways that art shapes identity, provides meaning, and helps individuals confront despair, joy, and the question of what a life well-lived looks like.

Art and truths that resist paraphrase 🔗

There is also a class of truths that art can express that no other form of discourse can reproduce. For Heidegger, the task of art is to disclose the truth of human being in a way that propositional language cannot fully capture. A poem about grief does not give us a definition of grief. It gives us the presence of grief – its texture, its weight, its particular shape in a particular life. That presence is an existential possibility made available to the reader. The reader does not need to have experienced that grief themselves. The artwork brings the possibility into their world.

This is why existentialist thinkers valued theatre and the novel so highly. All the major existentialist thinkers, with the exception of Merleau-Ponty, held that the form that best enabled the revelatory potential of art was theatre, followed by the novel. Both forms excel at making interior life – decision, anxiety, desire, bad faith – visible and inhabitable for an audience. They do not argue about existence; they enact it.

Art, existence, and social reality 🔗

The existential possibilities art presents are not abstract or purely private. They are deeply bound up with historical, social, and political conditions. All human beings face existential questions in virtue of being human, but there is no denying that racial conditions inflect the general existential considerations of despair, joy, meaningfulness, and absurdity. Art that presents existential possibilities thus also engages with the concrete conditions – oppression, freedom, alienation, solidarity – within which those possibilities are lived.

Sartre’s existential aesthetics can be understood as asking not merely what is beautiful, but what kind of art is worth making – what purpose should art be concerned with fulfilling. His answer was that art must serve human freedom – not by preaching, but by presenting human existence in its full weight, complexity, and possibility, so that viewers and readers come to feel the reality of their own freedom and responsibility.

When an artist presents the world, whether she likes it or not, this presentation also proposes to others ways to live in the world – ways to see what has been ignored, feel what has been numbed, and choose what has been foreclosed. Art, in this sense, is never merely aesthetic. It is always also ethical and political, because it shapes the horizon of what people can imagine for themselves and for one another.

What this view tells us about art’s unique role 🔗

The view of art as a presentation of existential possibilities distinguishes it sharply from both pure formalism (art as arrangements of form and color) and simple mimesis (art as imitation of reality). Art does something neither of these accounts captures: it brings the possible into presence. It makes available – through image, narrative, sound, or gesture – ways of existing that expand the viewer’s sense of what human life can be.

This is why art has genuine cognitive value, even when it presents fictions. It is not that artworks provide information about the world in the way a textbook does. It is that they provide acquaintance with existential possibilities – with ways of grieving, loving, resisting, despairing, or finding meaning – that deepen the viewer’s understanding of human existence. Existential aesthetics remains a promising and exciting branch of aesthetics that has perhaps been unduly neglected, and its core insight – that art matters existentially, not just aesthetically – is one that philosophy is only beginning to fully articulate.

Art, on this view, is neither escapism nor mere decoration. It is a mode of disclosure. It opens possibilities. And in doing so, it contributes to a deeper, more honest understanding of what it means to be human.

What do you think? If art presents existential possibilities rather than representations of reality, does that mean there are truths about human existence that only art – and not science or philosophy – can reveal? And does this view change how you understand your own encounters with artworks that have stayed with you long after you first experienced them?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-existentialist/
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/
3. https://philopedia.org/philosophers/martin-heidegger/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imaginary_(Sartre)
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
6. https://philosophynow.org/issues/32/Imagination_and_Creativity_in_Jean-Paul_Sartre
7. https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/80/3/265/6609130
8. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/existentialism-and-aesthetics/v-1/sections/the-classical-understanding-of-art
9. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282612914_Sartre's_Existentialism_and_Aesthetics_Art_for_the_Sake_of_Existential_and_Social_Projects
10. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/95589/1/Maes_Existential.pdf