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A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.
existentialist ex'is·ten'tial·ist adj. & n.A doctrine which emphasizes the difference between human existence and that of inanimate objects. Later supporters of this philosophy saw human beings as self-created; they are not initially endowed with characteristics but choose their own characteristics by ‘leaps’. Thus a person may be said to believe in God because he or she has chosen to do so. Other existentialists see that the only certainty for each one of us is death, and that the individual must live in the knowledge of that certainty.
In geography, existentialism sees individuals as striving to build up a self which is not given, either by nature or by a culture. Human beings are thus not rational decision-makers but the subjects of their experiences. Landscapes are seen through the eyes of the beholder. Such a view runs counter to the ‘mechanistic’ views of, say, environmental determinism or economic determinism, which would seem to deny human beings any freedom of action.
Concept borrowed by twentieth-century European philosophers from the theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) but shorn of any religious meaning. First attested in English in 1941, apparently as a translation of German Existentialismus, itself derived from Kierkegaard's Danish neologism Existents-Forhold. Nietzsche and Heidegger are also formative influences on many (mostly literary figures rather than philosophers) who describe themselves as existentialists. Existentialism is very hard to define but may be summarized as the belief that people are all that there is. It is expressed in reaction to the grand designs in human history seen by Hegel and his followers. In particular, it denies the existence of natural law, an unchanging human nature, or indeed any objective rules. Each individual is cursed with freedom and must make his or her own way in the world, although many people resort to devices to hide this from themselves. Life is without ultimate meaning, but we are forced to make choices all the time. The spirit of existentialism is well summarized in a poem (1922) by A. E. Housman (1859-1936) on being an unacknowledged homosexual in a homophobic society:
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made
existentialism
For more information on existentialism, visit Britannica.com.
A philosophy which gives priority to human existence, that is to say, subjective experience of the world, rather than to abstract or ‘objective’ structures or essences. It views human existence as radically different in nature from the existence of the physical world, in so far as men and women are free to make of themselves the kind of people they want to be and, to some extent, to make for themselves the kind of world they want to live in. This freedom entails concomitant responsibilities; it is not freedom in a void, for each person's freedom comes into contact and possible conflict with that of everyone else. Our ‘being-in-the-world’ is bound up with our ‘being-with-others’, and in this sense Existentialism has an overriding moral dimension, even if it eschews any notion of moral rules or absolutes. In fact, Existentialists usually espouse a situational ethics, in which the consequences of a particular act in particular social and historical circumstances take priority over absolute ethical norms. This is quite contrary to any view of a ‘moral law’ (e.g. Kant's), but not necessarily radically incompatible with a certain kind of liberal Christianity. Indeed, the first Existentialist is generally considered to be the 19th-c. Danish theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, who set out to defend subjective experience against the totalization and objectivization of the Hegelian system. 20th-c Existentialists are generally more keen to explore all the implications of a thoroughgoing atheism, though there have been several notable Catholic Existentialists, such as Gabriel Marcel in France.
Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) and Sartre's L'Être et le néant (1943) are probably the best-known Existentialist works of this century [Sartre's thought is more fully treated in the entries devoted to him and to L'Être et le néant]. Neither discusses individual human existence in the usual sense: Heidegger's work centres on Dasein (being-there, existence) which is not individuated, and, although Sartre's adoption of Corbin's translation of Dasein as ‘la réalité humaine’ has been criticized for its humanism, it does avoid the individuation inherent in the notion of a ‘human being’. Sartre's own examination of the pour-soi of human consciousness is also distinct from any notion of person or individual ego. Existentialists prefer to explore ‘consciousness’ or perhaps the ‘subject’, rather than the ‘self, for the former terms do not imply that identity or essence which is called in question by Existentialism.
Existentialism is popularly associated with the notoriety it enjoyed in Paris in the 1940s, when its opposition to the dominant encoded forms of power and ideology was discussed and perhaps lived out in the hothouse atmosphere of Saint-German-des-Prés cafés and night-clubs. The identification of a philosophical movement with the life-style of its major proponents (here, principally, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) is, however, necessarily short-lived, and existential philosophy has wider implications than the youthful revolt encapsulated in the Left-Bank protest movement. It is possible that post-war France needed the sugar-coating of a cult movement to help it swallow Existentialism's high moral seriousness.
[Christina Howells]
Existentialism in its various forms takes its origins from Kierkegaard, whose works, subjected to violent attack in his lifetime, have in the 20th c. exercised a powerful influence which has been greatly increased by the effects of industrial development and of two world wars. The sense of threatened individuality, of dread (Angst), of solitude, and of tragedy springs from the conditions of life in this age, but a powerful formulation of them lay ready to hand in Kierkegaard's writings. It is only in France that there arose, around Sartre, a movement which can properly be called existentialisme. Germany has existential philosophers, some, like Jaspers, willingly so called, others, like Heidegger, rejecting the description. The preferred locution is Existenzphilosophie. Almost all writers of the 20th c. reflect existential problems. A symptom of the consciousness of the problem is the widespread use by critics of the neologism existentiell.
A loose title for various philosophies that emphasize certain common themes: the individual, the experience of choice, and the absence of rational understanding of the universe with a consequent dread or sense of absurdity in human life. The combination suggests an emotional tone or mood rather than a set of deductively related theses, and existentialism attained its zenith in Europe following the disenchantments of the Second World War. However, the first significant thinker to stress such themes was Kierkegaard, whose work is generally regarded as the origin of existentialism. Existentialist writing both reacts against the view that the universe is a closed, coherent, intelligible system, and finds the resulting contingency a cause for lamentation. In the face of an indifferent universe we are thrown back upon our own freedom. Acting authentically becomes acting in the light of the open space of possibilities that the world allows. Different writers who united in stressing the importance of these themes nevertheless developed very different ethical and metaphysical systems as a consequence. In Heidegger existentialism turns into scholastic ontology; in Sartre into a dramatic exploration of moments of choice and stress; in the theologians Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann it becomes a device for reinventing the relationships between people and God. Existentialism never took firm root outside continental Europe, and many philosophers have voiced mistrust of particular existentialist concerns, for example with being and non-being, or with the libertarian flavour of its analysis of free will.
Existentialism, a philosophical and literary movement identified largely with the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, gained influence after World War I. The roots of existentialism are varied, found in the work of the Danish religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Sartre's philosophy was influenced by the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and philosopher Martin Heidegger. Existentialism is notoriously difficult to define. It is as much a mood or temper as it is a philosophical system. The religious existentialism of Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, and Gabriel Marcel differs from the resolute atheism of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. Nonetheless, certain essential assumptions are shared.
In existentialism, existence is both freedom and despair. In a world without apparent meaning or direction, the individual is radically free to act. Most individuals are afraid to confront the responsibility entailed by radical freedom. In Sartrean terms, bad faith and inauthenticity allow individuals to consider themselves as an essence, a fixed entity; they playact in life. In contrast, the existential individual refuses illusions. Death looms as a boundary situation, defining the limits of existence. The recognition of such limits and the responsibility for one's actions lead to an existential despair that can overwhelm the individual.
However, Sartre, Beauvoir, and religious existentialists consider despair a painful but necessary stop on the road to freedom. Since existence is prior to essence, the existential individual at every moment confronts the nothingness of existence. Transcendence occurs when the individual undertakes a project that will give meaning to his or her life. While such acts are individually subjective, they are intertwined with everyone else's reality. No act, or failure to act, is without larger meaning and context. Existentialism, initiated with the subjective despair of the individual, ends with an ethic founded upon the shared goal of human solidarity.
Religious existentialism also begins with individual anguish and despair. Men and women are radically alone, adrift in a world without apparent meaning. Religious existentialists, however, confront meaning through faith. Since existentialism is concerned with the individual and concrete experience, religious faith must be subjective and deep. Faith is less a function of religious observance than of inner transformation. But, as Kierkegaard elucidated, because of the enormous distance between the profane and the sacred, existential religious faith can never be complacent or confident. For existential men and women, whether religious or secular, life is a difficult process of becoming, of choosing to make themselves under the sign of their own demise. Life is lived on the edge.
Sartre and Beauvoir believed that existentialism would fail to catch hold in the United States, because it was a nation marked by optimism, confidence, and faith in progress. They were mistaken. Existentialism not only became significant in the postwar years, but it had been an important theme earlier. This is hardly surprising, because an existential perspective transcends national or historical boundaries. It is, as many existentialists have argued, part of the human condition.
American Existentialism: Before the Fact
An existential mood or perspective has long been important in America. Kierkegaard's theology of despair was anticipated in the Puritan's anguished religious sensibility. The distance between the individual and God that defined Puritanism has existential echoes, as the historian Perry Miller noted in his study of Jonathan Edwards's theology. Herman Melville's character Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick (1851) personifies the existential individual battling to create meaning in a universe abandoned by God. Radical alienation and the search for meaning in an absurd world are common themes in the work of the late-nineteenth-century writer Stephen Crane. William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, posited a pluralistic and wild universe. His vision promoted both radical freedom and anguish of responsibility. For James, much like Sartre later, consciousness is an active agent rather than an essence. Therefore, the individual must impose order on the universe or confront a life without depth or meaning. Similarly, turn-of-the-century dissenters from American optimism and progress, such as James, Henry Adams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., developed an existential perspective that appreciated the tragic elements in modern life and that upheld a heroically skeptical stance in the face of the absurd nature of existence. In the 1920s, novelists from the Lost Generation, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, spiritually wounded survivors of World War I, presented characters adrift, searching for existential meaning in their lives.
Kierkegaard in America
Beginning in the late 1920s, largely through the efforts of the retired minister Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard's existential theology entered into American intellectual life. By the late 1940s, most of Kierkegaard's writings had been translated by Lowrie. For Lowrie and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Kierkegaard's impassioned Christian perspective, with its emphasis on how the reality of death granted meaning to life, questioned the complacency of mainstream Protestantism. Kierkegaard offered a tragic vision of life based on faith rather than church dogma. The Kierkegaardian focus on the inner life, on the individual wrestling with God, fit well with the perspective of many intellectuals and artists in America who were filled with anxiety and in search of transcendence. By the 1940s, and well into the 1960s, Kierkegaardian ideas appeared in the Pulitzer Prize–winning poem The Age of Anxiety (1947) by W. H. Auden, in a symphony based on that work by Leonard Bernstein, in the paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and in the novels of Walker Percy. The political implications of Kierkegaardian existentialism were generally conservative. The former communist agent Whittaker Chambers found a refuge from radical politics in Kierkegaard; others discovered that Kierkegaardian concerns about anxiety and salvation led them away from political engagement and toward an inward despair or religious sanctuary.
French Existentialism in America
In the wake of the economic and physical destruction caused by World War II in Europe and the dawning of the Cold War and nuclear age, French existentialism became a worldwide vogue. It seemed to be a philosophy appropriate for the postwar world. Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus triumphantly visited the United States in the late 1940s. Their writings were quickly translated and reached wide audiences. Sartre's philosophical opus, Being and Nothingness (1943), was translated by Hazel E. Barnes in 1956. In that same year, the Princeton University professor Walter Kaufmann's important anthology of existentialist writings appeared. In this work, and in many other popularizations and collections of existentialism, the existential canon was narrowly presumed to be thoroughly European, in origin and current expression.
By the 1950s, existentialism fit neatly into the general sense of alienation and tragedy popular among American intellectuals. Existentialism's emphasis on the sanctity of the individual, his or her rejection of absolutes, and comprehension of the alienating nature of modern existence fed into postwar examinations of the totalitarian temper. For the African American writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, existential ideals allowed them to critique both Marxism and American racism. Each of them sought in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the help of existentialism, to ground their characters within the concrete experiences of racism while relating problems to the human condition. The novelist Norman Mailer's existentialism presented the battle between good and evil as at the heart of the human condition. The art critic Harold Rosenberg's concept of action art defined abstract expressionist painting with the vocabulary of existentialism. Although many intellectuals associated with the Partisan Review rejected existentialism because of Sartre and Beauvoir's radical politics, they nevertheless shared basic assumptions about the tragic responsibility that came with freedom.
Existentialism in the 1960s
For a younger generation, coming of age in the 1960s, the left-wing political associations of Sartrean existentialism were celebrated rather than rejected. Existentialism had become entrenched in the university curriculum by the early 1960s. Student radicals embraced existential commitment and rejected inauthenticity. Existentialism gave students a language to question the complacent assumptions of American society. It placed all questions in the realm of choice; passivity was a choice not to act. For Robert Moses, the decision to go to Mississippi in the early 1960s to organize voting campaigns for disfranchised blacks was an existential commitment. The repression that he faced was part of the absurd nature of existence. His ability to continue, despite the violence, was testimony to his existential beliefs. The ideas of Beauvoir in her The Second Sex (U.S. translation, 1953) influenced the American women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Employing the terminology that she and Sartre had developed, Beauvoir's famous words that "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" signaled the existential fact that woman existed not as an essence but as a being with the choice to create her own existence. Betty Friedan, most famously, used many of Beauvoir's concepts in her own influential book, The Feminine Mystique (1963).
The Fate of Existentialism
In the late 1970s, existentialism's popularity waned for a host of reasons. The existential imperative for the individual to choose, in the hands of pop psychologists, was stripped of its anguish and despair and corrupted into a rather facile expression of unlimited human potential. In academic culture, universalist ideals of the human condition and freedom conflicted with poststructural and postmodernist thought. But existentialism, like postmodernism, viewed identity as something created, albeit with a greater sense of anguish. Today, existentialism remains a symbol of alienation and a critique of confident individualism.
Bibliography
Barnes, Hazel E. An Existentialist Ethics. New York: Knopf, 1967.
———. The Story I Tell Myself: A Venture into Existentialist Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1958.
Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Fulton, Ann. Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945– 1963. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956.
May, Rollo. The Meaning of Anxiety. New York: Ronald Press, 1950.
—George Cotkin
Bibliography
See J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism (1947); J. Macquarrie, Studies in Christian Existentialism (1966); R. C. Solomon, ed., Existentialism (1974); D. E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction (1990); D. B. Raymond, ed., Existentialism and the Philosophical Tradition (1991).
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The philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though neither used the term "existentialism", are considered fundamental to
the existentialist movement.
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Existentialism is a philosophical movement which claims that individual human beings create the meanings and essence of their own lives.
It is a reaction against more traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and empiricism, which sought to discover an ultimate order in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world, and therefore universal meaning. The movement had its origins in the 19th century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and was prevalent in Continental philosophy. In the 1940s and 1950s, French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote scholarly and fictional works that helped to popularize themes associated with existentialism, including "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, [and] nothingness".[1]
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Existentialism differentiates itself from the modern Western rationalist tradition of philosophers such as Descartes in rejecting the idea that the most certain and primary reality is rational consciousness. Descartes argues in his Meditations on First Philosophy that, while humans can doubt almost all aspects of reality as illusions, humans can be certain of their consciousness, which is therefore the only truth ("Cogito ergo sum").
Existentialism decisively rejects this argument, asserting instead that as conscious beings, humans would always find themselves already in a world, a prior context and a history that is given to consciousness, and that humans cannot think away that world. It is inherent and indubitably linked to consciousness. In other words, the ultimate and unquestionable reality is not thinking consciousness but, according to Heidegger, "being in the world". This is a radicalization of the notion of intentionality that comes from Brentano and Husserl, which asserts that, even in its barest form, all consciousness is always a consciousness of something.
A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence; that is, that a human being's existence precedes and is more fundamental than any meaning which may be ascribed to human life: humans define their own reality. There is no connection to literature either. One is not bound to the generalities and a priori definitions of what "being human" connotes. This is an inversion of a more traditional view, which was widely accepted from the ancient Greeks to Hegel, that the central project of philosophy was to answer the question "What is a human being?" (i.e., "What is the human essence") and to derive from that answer one's conclusions about how human beings should behave.
In Repetition, Kierkegaard's literary character Young Man laments:
Heidegger coined the term "thrownness" (also used by Sartre) to describe this idea that human beings are "thrown" into existence without having chosen it. Existentialists consider being thrown into existence as prior to, and the horizon or context of, any other thoughts or ideas that humans have or definitions of themselves that they create.
Sartre, in Essays in Existentialism, further highlights this consciousness of being thrown into existence in the following fashion. "If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be".
Kierkegaard also focused on the deep anxiety of human existence — the feeling that there is no purpose, indeed nothing, at its core. Finding a way to counter this nothingness, by embracing existence, is the fundamental theme of existentialism, and the root of the philosophy's name. Someone who believes in reality might be called a "realist," and someone who believes in a deity could identify as a "theist." Someone who believes fundamentally only in existence, and seeks to find meaning in his or her life solely by embracing existence, is an existentialist.
Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose themselves to rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue against definitions of human beings as primarily rational. Rather, existentialists look at where people find meaning. Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on what has meaning to them rather than what is rational.
The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard saw rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter their existential anxiety, their fear of being in the world. "If I can believe that I am rational and everyone else is rational then I have nothing to fear and no reason to feel anxious about being free."
Sartre saw rationality as a form of "bad faith," an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — "the other" — that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of "bad faith" hinder us from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress our feelings of anxiety and dread, we confine ourselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserts, thereby relinquishing our freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the look" of "the other".
In a similar vein, Camus believed that society and religion falsely teach humans that "the other" has order and structure.[3] For Camus, when an individual's "consciousness," longing for order, collides with "the other's" lack of order, a third element is born: "absurdity".
It then follows that existentialism tends to view human beings as subjects in an indifferent, objective, often ambiguous, and "absurd" universe, in which meaning is not provided by the natural order, but rather can be created, however provisionally and unstably, by human beings' actions and interpretations.
During the literary modernist movement in the 1900s, authors began describing dystopian societies and surreal and absurd situations in a parallel universe, a trend that paralleled the existentialist movement. In Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis, a man awakes to the realization that he has turned into a creature often interpreted to be a dung beetle or cockroach. This story, which is certainly "absurd" and surreal, is one of many modernist literary works that influenced and were influenced by existentialist philosophy.
Although there are certain common tendencies amongst existentialist thinkers, there are major differences and disagreements among them, and not all of them even accept the validity of the term "existentialism." In German, the phrase Existenzphilosophie (philosophy of existence) is also used.
Some existentialists, like Kierkegaard, conceive the fundamental existentialist question as man's relationship to God; some accept Nietzsche's proclamation that "God is dead;" they believe that the concept of God is obsolete. Nonetheless, theological existentialism as advocated by philosophers and theologians including Paul Tillich, Gabriel Marcel, and Martin Buber shares many of the same tenets and themes that are central to atheistic existentialism. Belief in God is a personal choice made on the basis of a passion, of faith, an observation, or experience. Just as atheistic existentialists can freely choose not to believe, theistic existentialists can freely choose to believe in God and, despite one's doubt, have faith that God exists and that God is good. A further type of existentialism is agnostic existentialism. The agnostic existentialist makes no claim to know, or not know, if there is a "greater picture" in play; rather, he simply recognizes that the greatest truth is that which he chooses to act upon. The agnostic existentialist feels that to know the "greater picture," whether there is one or not, is impossible for human minds—or, if it is possible, that it has not been found yet. Like the Christian existentialists, the agnostic believes existence is subjective. From the agnostic existentialist perspective, to find knowledge of the existence of God often has little value or is impossible, or it is believed to be useless. Opinions of philosophers associated with existentialism vary, sometimes greatly, over what "existentialism" is, and even if there is such a thing as "existentialism".
Some of the tenets associated with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre include:
There are several terms Sartre uses in his works. Being in-itself is an object that is not free and cannot change its essence. Being for-itself is free; it does not need to be what it is and can change into what it is not. Consciousness is usually considered being for-itself. Sartre distinguishes between positional and non-positional consciousness. Non-positional consciousness is being merely conscious of one's surroundings. Positional consciousness puts consciousness into relation of one's surroundings. This entails an explicit awareness of being conscious of one's surroundings. Sartre argues identity is constructed by this explicit awareness of consciousness.
Existential themes have been hinted at throughout history. Examples include Gautama Buddha's teachings, the Bible in the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job, Saint Augustine in his Confessions, Saint Thomas Aquinas' writings, and Mulla Sadra's writings. Individualist politics, such as those advanced by John Locke, advocated individual autonomy and self-determination rather than the state ruling over the individual. This kind of political philosophy, although not existential in nature, provided a welcoming climate for existentialism.
In 1670, Blaise Pascal's unfinished notes were published under the title of Pensées (i.e., "Thoughts"). In the work, he described many fundamental themes of existentialism. Pascal argued that without a God, life would be meaningless and miserable. People would only be able to create obstacles and overcome them in an attempt to escape boredom. These token-victories would ultimately become meaningless, since people would eventually die. This was good enough reason not to choose to become an atheist, according to Pascal.
Existentialism, in its currently recognizable 20th century form, was inspired by Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. It became popular in the mid-20th century through the works of the French writer-philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whose versions of it were set out in a popular form in Sartre's 1946 Existentialism is a Humanism and Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity.
Gabriel Marcel pursued theological versions of existentialism, most notably Christian existentialism. Other theological existentialists include Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Miguel de Unamuno, Thomas Hora and Martin Buber. Moreover, one-time Marxist Nikolai Berdyaev, developed a philosophy of Christian existentialism in his native Russia, and later in France, in the decades preceding World War II.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer are also important influences on the development of existentialism (although not precursors), because the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were written in response or opposition to Hegel and Schopenhauer, respectively.
The first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement are Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though neither used the term "existentialism". Like Pascal, they were interested in people's concealment of the meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. However, what Pascal did not write about was that people can create and change their fundamental values and beliefs. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wrote that human nature and human identity vary depending on what values and beliefs humans hold.[4][5] Objective truths (for example mathematical truths) are important, but detached or observational modes of thought can never truly comprehend human experience. Great individuals invent their own values and create the very terms under which they excel. Kierkegaard's knight of faith and Nietzsche's Übermensch are examples of those who define the nature of their own existence. In contrast, Pascal did not reason that human nature and identity are constituted by the free decisions and choices of people.
Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's works were published too early to be considered a part of the 20th century existentialist movement. They were philosophers whose works and influences are not limited to existentialism. They have been appropriated and seen as precursors to many other intellectual movements, including postmodernism, nihilism, and various strands of psychology. Thus, it is unknown whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century or accepted tenets of Jean-Paul Sartre's version of it. Nevertheless, their works are precursors to many later developments in existentialist thought.
One of the first German existentialists was Karl Jaspers. Jaspers recognized the importance of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and attempted to build an "Existenz" philosophy around the two. Heidegger, who was influenced by Jaspers and the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, wrote his most influential work Being and Time which postulates Dasein (pronounced dah-zIne), literally being there—a being that is constituted by its temporality, illuminates and interprets the meaning of being in time. Dasein is sometimes considered the human subject, but Heidegger denies the Cartesian dualism of subject-object/mind-body.
Although existentialists view Heidegger to be an important philosopher in the movement, he vehemently denied being an existentialist in the Sartrean sense, and responded to Sartre in A Letter about Humanism, denying his philosophy was existentialism.
Jean-Paul Sartre is perhaps the most well-known existentialist and is one of the few to have accepted being called an "existentialist". Sartre developed his version of existentialist philosophy under the influence of Husserl and Heidegger. Being and Nothingness is perhaps his most important work about existentialism. Sartre was also talented in his ability to espouse his ideas in different media, including philosophical essays, lectures, novels, plays, and the theater. No Exit and Nausea are two of his celebrated works. In the 1960s, he attempted to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Albert Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with existential themes including The Rebel, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus and Summer in Algiers. He, like many others, rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works to be concerned with man facing the absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock up a hill for eternity, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll back to the bottom again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless, but he feels Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it, which he views as the noble quality of man.
Critic Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov wove the existential belief that man is an absurd creature loose in a universe empty of real meaning into their plays. Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophies better than Sartre and Camus did in their own plays. Though most of the playwrights subsequently labeled "Absurdist" (based on this book) denied affiliations with existentialism and were often staunchly anti-philosophical (for example Ionesco often claimed he identified more with 'Pataphysics or with Surrealism than with existentialism) the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd are often linked to existentialism based on Esslin's observation. [6] Simone de Beauvoir, who was a longtime companion to Sartre, wrote about feminist and existential ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and Ethics of Ambiguity.
Franz Fanon a French-born critic of colonialism has been considered an important existentialist. [7]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an often overlooked existentialist, was a companion of Sartre. His understanding of Husserl's phenomenology was far greater than that of his fellow existentialists. His work, Humanism and Terror, greatly influenced Sartre.
Michel Foucault would also be considered an existentialist through his use of history to reveal the constant alterations of created meaning, thus proving its failure to produce a cohesive form of reality.
Many writers who are not usually considered philosophers have also had a major influence on existentialism. Among them, Czech author Franz Kafka and Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky are most prominent. Franz Kafka created often surreal and alienated characters who struggle with hopelessness and absurdity, notably in his most famous novella, The Metamorphosis, or in his master novel, The Trial. The Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground details the story of a man who is unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Many of Dostoyevsky's novels, such as Crime and Punishment, have covered issues pertinent to existential philosophy while simultaneously refuting the validity of the claims of existentialism. Throughout Crime and Punishment we see the protagonist, Raskolnikov, and his character develop away from existential ideas and beliefs in favor of Christian Existentialism, which Dostoevsky had come to advocate at this time.
In the 20th century, existentialism experienced a resurgence in popular art forms. In fiction, Hermann Hesse's 1928 novel Steppenwolf, based on an idea in Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843), sold well in the West. Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets adopted existentialist themes. In addition, "arthouse" films began quoting and alluding to existentialist thought and thinkers.
Existentialist novelists were generally seen as a mid-1950s phenomenon that continued until the mid- to late 1970s. Most of the major writers were either French or from French African colonies. Small circles of other Europeans were seen as literary existential precursors by the existentialists themselves, however, literary history increasingly has questioned the accuracy of this idealism for earlier models.
There is overlap between the expatriate American beat generation writers who found Paris their spiritual home, and writers of road novels. This also extends to the delayed action of the French permanent enamorment with the United States' hard boiled fiction genre, which, as Truffaut and others in the Cahiers du Cinéma indicated, influenced novels and plays. To some extent as well, the surrealist movement of Andre Breton and others, which questioned the established reality, made possible the isolation of non-academic novels protagonised by amoral anti-heroes.
Herbert Marcuse criticized existentialism, especially in Sartre's Being and Nothingness, for projecting certain features of living in a modern, oppressive society, such as anxiety and meaninglessness, onto the nature of existence itself: "In so far as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypothesizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory" [8]. Sartre had already responded to some points of the Marxist criticisms of Existentialism in his popular lecture Existentialism is a humanism, held in 1946.
Theodor Adorno, in his Jargon of Authenticity, criticized Heidegger's philosophy, with special attention to his use of language, as a mystifying ideology of advanced industrial society and its power structure.[citation needed]
Heidegger criticized Sartre's Existentialism, in his Letter on Humanism:
Roger Scruton claimed, in his book From Descartes to Wittgenstein, that both Heidegger's concept of inauthenticity and Sartre's concept of bad faith were inconsistent; both deny any universal moral creed, yet speak of these concepts as if everyone is bound to abide by them. In chapter 18, he writes,"In what sense Sartre is able to 'recommend' the authenticity which consists in the purely self-made morality is unclear. He does recommend it, but, by his own argument, his recommendation can have no objective force." Familiar with this sort of argument, Sartre claimed that bad and good faith do not represent moral ideas, rather, they are ways of being. [original research?]Logical positivists, such as Carnap and Ayer, claim that existentialists frequently become confused over the verb "to be" in their analyses of "being".[9] The verb is prefixed to a predicate and to use the word without any predicate is meaningless. Another source of confusion in the existentialist metaphysical literature is that they try to understand the meaning of the word "nothing" (the negation of existence) by assuming that it must refer to something. Borrowing Kant's argument against the ontological argument for the existence of God, the logical positivists argue that existence is not a property.[citation needed]
The term existentialism was first adopted as a self-reference in the 1940's and 1950's by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the widespread use of literature as a means of disseminating their ideas by Sartre and his associates (notably novelist Albert Camus) meant existentialism "was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one."[10] Among existentialist writers were Parisians Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and playwright Samuel Beckett, the Norwegian Knut Hamsun and the Romanian friends Eugene Ionesco and Emil Cioran . Prominent artists such as the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning have been understood in existentialist terms, as have filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman.[10]
Although postmodernist thought became the focus of many intellectuals in the 1970s and thereafter, much postmodern writing considers themes similar to existentialism.[citation needed] Since 1970, much cultural activity in art, cinema, and literature contains postmodern and existential elements, which, ironically, would support the postmodern thesis of "borderlessness between concepts", although postmodernism and existentialism are distinct.[citation needed]
Books such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), (now republished as Blade Runner) by Philip K. Dick and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk both distort the line between reality and appearance while simultaneously espousing strong existential themes. Ideas from such thinkers as Dostoevsky, Foucault, Kafka, Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, Gilles Deleuze and Eduard von Hartmann permeate the works of writers such as Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski, and one often finds in such works a delicate balance between distastefulness and beauty.
Contemporary American writers, such as Chuck Palahniuk have been described as belonging to a genre of literature called Post-Postmodernism.[11] In their works, there are often elements of distortion from the "traditional" mode of narrative, which often try to grab and shock the reader and return him or her to their present. This function that comes through the form of their writing has been described as a "Metaphysics of Presence", in which, it is hoped, the intentionality of consciousness will be diverted from its inauthentic state of "care" (Heidegger's expression for the content, which consciousness fills itself with, often concerned with the trivialities of everyday life or "everydayness") towards such existential realizations of death, the here-and-now, freedom and all of its corresponding angst. It is in that relation, that such thinkers as Heidegger would argue, that one finds one's authenticity.
Thus, the element of literature that permeates such books as Fight Club is often described as existential in nature, often directing postmodernism directly. In Fight Club, the Tyler Durden character appears as a representation of the philosophy of the postmodern classic Anti-Oedipus, and its idealization of the schizo-subject, who resists the capitalistic order of the day and devours and spits out the social codes. Durden grows increasingly more nihilistic as the book progresses and is ultimately rejected at the end of the book.
Postpostmodernist literature can often be called a synthesis between the movements of Existentialism and Post-Modernism, or as a new genre of literature, film and art, that is of an existential nature and is an evolved form of Existentialism. Neo-Existentialism, some would say, is intrinsically different from the postpostmodern via its existential emphasis.[11]
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In cinema, postmodern editing techniques, showing the displacement, discontinuity, and temporal perspective can be used to help show existential ideas. Post-modernism, can go hand-in-hand with a purely existential story, thus synthesizing technique and function to give meaning. Moreover, this has created the neologism "Neo-Existentialism"—combining post-modernism's epistemology with the reflective ontological belief of existentialism. Existential cinema deals with themes of:
The 1952 classic High Noon, starring Gary Cooper as a sheriff abandoned by the townspeople as he faces alone a vengeful killer, has often been described as an "existential Western".[12]
In the 1950's the work of the Italian directors Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as that of Roberto Rossellini, one of the founders of the Neorealist movement, "broke" with the established Neorealist tradition of objectivity by exploring themes of subjectivity, identity, and alienation linked to Existentialism.
A major existential movement in cinema was launched by the advent of French New Wave cinema in the 1960's. Landmark films during this period were Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard and written by François Truffaut. Truffaut released his masterpiece, The 400 Blows, in the same year. Both Godard and Truffaut would go on to become flagbearers of existentialist cinema and produce notable films like Alphaville, Bande a part, Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board.
The acclaimed 1976 film Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro, is perhaps one of the most widely known existential films. The film was heavily
influenced by Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and even quotes
Dostoevsky in the line: "I'm God's lonely man." The
The introduction sequence of the 1957 film Love in the Afternoon contains the witty remark "even existentialists make love in Paris."
The 1972 film Deliverance, as well as the 1970 book of the
same name, have also been credited as existentialist, as has Fight Club
(1999),[13] and
The 2003 film Lost in Translation (film), directed by Sofia Coppola, contains existential themes.
Waking Life, a 2001 animated film written and directed by Richard Linklater, examines various philosophical viewpoints, existentialism being among them.
Aki Kaurismaki, the Finnish Director was popular for his existential films like Ariel The man without a past Leningrad cowboys
goto America Hamlet
Perhaps the most famous of existentialist plays is Huis Clos (No Exit) by the French writer and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. Existentialist themes have also influenced much of the Theatre of the Absurd, notably Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.
Existentialism has had a significant influence on theology, notably on postmodern Christianity and on theologians and religious thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Paul Tillich and John Macquarrie.
Many of the theories of Sigmund Freud, whom Sartre refuted systematically, were influenced by Nietzsche. Some have supposed that Thanatos and Eros were closely related to Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of Nietzschean philosophy.
One of the major offshoots of existentialism as a philosophy is existential psychology. Sometimes termed the Third Force Psychology[attribution needed], this branch of psychology was initiated by Viktor Frankl (who had studied with Freud and Jung when young).[citation needed] Then early in his career he was sent to a Nazi concentration camp where he survived from 1941 through 1945. In the camps he mentally re-wrote his first book whose manuscript had been confiscated at the time of his arrest. He called his theory Logotherapy and the book was Man's Search for Mean
