History

19th century
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Main article: Sren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche
Sren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered
fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is
unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on
subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which
they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. LikePascal,
they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use
of diversion to escape from boredom. Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the
role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such
choices change the nature and identity of the chooser.[48] Kierkegaard's knight of faith and
Nietzsche's bermensch are representative of people who exhibitFreedom, in that they define the
nature of their own existence. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his own values and creates the
very terms they excel under. By contrast, Kierkegaard, opposed to the level of abstraction in Hegel,
and not nearly as hostile (actually welcoming) to Christianity as Nietzsche, argues through a
pseudonym that the objective certainty of religious truths (specifically Christian) is not only
impossible, but even founded on logical paradoxes. Yet he continues to imply that a leap of faith is a
possible means for an individual to reach a higher stage of existence that transcends and contains
both an aesthetic and ethical value of life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also precursors to other
intellectual movements, including postmodernism, and various strands ofpsychology. However,
Kierkegaard believed that individuals should live in accordance with their thinking.
Dostoyevsky[edit]
The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian Fyodor
Dostoyevsky.[49] Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground portrays a man unable to fit into society and
unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on
existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism, quoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an
example of existential crisis. Sartre attributes Ivan Karamazov's claim, "If God did not exist,
everything would be permitted"[50] to Dostoyevsky himself, though this quote does not appear in the
novel.[51] However, a similar sentiment is explicitly stated when Alyosha visits Dimitri in prison. Dimitri
mentions his conversations with Rakitin in which the idea that "Then, if He doesn't exist, man is king
of the earth, of the universe" allowing the inference contained in Sartre's attribution to remain a valid
idea contested within the novel.[52] Other Dostoyevsky novels covered issues raised in existentialist
philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime

and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves
toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoyevsky himself. [citation needed]

Early 20th century[edit]

See also: Martin Heidegger
In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers explored existentialist
ideas. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, in his 1913 book The Tragic Sense of
Life in Men and Nations, emphasized the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract
rationalism. Unamuno rejected systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith. He
retained a sense of the tragic, even absurd nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest
in Cervantes' fictional character Don Quixote. A novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy
professor at the University of Salamanca, Unamuno wrote a short story about a priest's crisis of
faith, Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr, which has been collected in anthologies of existentialist fiction.
Another Spanish thinker, Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1914, held that human existence must always
be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life: "Yo soy yo
y mi circunstancia" ("I am myself and my circumstances"). Sartre likewise believed that human
existence is not an abstract matter, but is always situated ("en situation").
Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught at the
Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt, he stands apart from the mainstream of German philosophy.
Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1878, he was also a scholar of Jewish culture and involved at
various times inZionism and Hasidism. In 1938, he moved permanently to Jerusalem. His bestknown philosophical work was the short book I and Thou, published in 1922. For Buber, the
fundamental fact of human existence, too readily overlooked by scientific rationalism and abstract
philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue that takes place in the so-called "sphere of
between" ("das Zwischenmenschliche").[53]
Two Russian thinkers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev, became well known as existentialist
thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris. Shestov, born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family
in Kiev, had launched an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early as 1905 in
his book of aphorismsAll Things Are Possible.
Berdyaev, also from Kiev but with a background in the Eastern Orthodox Church, drew a radical
distinction between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for
Berdyaev, is rooted in the realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation. To
the extent the individual human being lives in the objective world, he is estranged from authentic
spiritual freedom. "Man" is not to be interpreted naturalistically, but as a being created in God's
image, an originator of free, creative acts.[54] He published a major work on these themes, The
Destiny of Man, in 1931.

Gabriel Marcel, long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important existentialist
themes to a French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" (1925) and in
his Metaphysical Journal (1927).[55] A dramatist as well as a philosopher, Marcel found his
philosophical starting point in a condition of metaphysical alienation: the human individual searching
for harmony in a transient life. Harmony, for Marcel, was to be sought through "secondary reflection",
a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world, characterized by "wonder and
astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of God rather than merely to
"information" about them. For Marcel, such presence implied more than simply being there (as one
thing might be in the presence of another thing); it connoted "extravagant" availability, and the
willingness to put oneself at the disposal of the other.[56]
Marcel contrasted secondary reflection with abstract, scientific-technical primary reflection, which he
associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a concrete
activity undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate embodied in a concrete world.
[55][57]

AlthoughJean-Paul Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own philosophy in the 1940s,

Marcel's thought has been described as "almost diametrically opposed" to that of Sartre. [55] Unlike
Sartre, Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in 1929.
In Germany, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers who later described existentialism as
a "phantom" created by the public [58] called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche, Existenzphilosophie. For Jaspers, "Existenz-philosophy is the way of thought by
means of which man seeks to become himself...This way of thought does not cognize objects, but
elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker." [59]
Jaspers, a professor at the University of Heidelberg, was acquainted with Martin Heidegger, who
held a professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928. They held
many philosophical discussions, but later became estranged over Heidegger's support of National
Socialism. They shared an admiration for Kierkegaard,[60] and in the 1930s, Heidegger lectured
extensively on Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the extent to which Heidegger should be considered an
existentialist is debatable. In Being and Time he presented a method of rooting philosophical
explanations in human existence (Dasein) to be analysed in terms of existential categories
(existentiale); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the
existentialist movement.

After the Second World War[edit]

Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical
and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as well as
theoretical texts.[61] These years also saw the growing reputation of Heidegger's book Being and
Time outside Germany.

Sartre dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel Nausea and the short stories in his 1939
collection The Wall, and had published his treatise on existentialism, Being and Nothingness, in
1943, but it was in the two years following the liberation of Paris from the German occupying forces
that he and his close associates Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others
became internationally famous as the leading figures of a movement known as existentialism. [62] In
a very short period of time, Camus and Sartre in particular became the leading public intellectuals of
post-war France, achieving by the end of 1945 "a fame that reached across all audiences." [63] Camus
was an editor of the most popular leftist (former French Resistance) newspaper Combat; Sartre
launched his journal of leftist thought, Les Temps Modernes, and two weeks later gave the widely
reported lecture on existentialism and secular humanism to a packed meeting of the Club
Maintenant. Beauvoir wrote that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us";
[64]

existentialism became "the first media craze of the postwar era."[65]

By the end of 1947, Camus' earlier fiction and plays had been reprinted, his new play Caligula had
been performed and his novel The Plague published; the first two novels of Sartre's The Roads to
Freedom trilogy had appeared, as had Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others. Works by Camus and
Sartre were already appearing in foreign editions. The Paris-based existentialists had become
famous.[62]
Sartre had traveled to Germany in 1930 to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin
Heidegger,[66] and he included critical comments on their work in his major treatise Being and
Nothingness. Heidegger's thought had also become known in French philosophical circles through
its use by Alexandre Kojve in explicating Hegel in a series of lectures given in Paris in the 1930s.
[67]

The lectures were highly influential; members of the audience included not only Sartre and

Merleau-Ponty, but Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Louis Althusser, Andr Breton,
and Jacques Lacan.[68] A selection from Heidegger's Being and Time was published in French in
1938, and his essays began to appear in French philosophy journals.
French-Algerian philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus

Heidegger read Sartre's work and was initially impressed, commenting: "Here for the first time I
encountered an independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out of
which I think. Your work shows such an immediate comprehension of my philosophy as I have never
before encountered."[69] Later, however, in response to a question posed by his French follower Jean
Beaufret,[70] Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre's position and existentialism in general in
hisLetter on Humanism.[71] Heidegger's reputation continued to grow in France during the 1950s and
1960s. In the 1960s, Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of
Dialectical Reason. A major theme throughout his writings was freedom and responsibility.
Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with existential themes
including The Rebel,Summer in Algiers, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Stranger, the latter being

"consideredto what would have been Camus's irritationthe exemplary existentialist

novel."[72] Camus, like many others, rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works
concerned with facing the absurd. In the titular book, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth
of Sisyphus to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity
to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom again. Camus
believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in
his task, simply by continually applying himself to it. The first half of the book contains an extended
rebuttal of what Camus took to be existentialist philosophy in the works of Kierkegaard, Shestov,
Heidegger, and Jaspers.
Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner, wrote
about feminist and existentialist ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of
Ambiguity. Although often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre, [73] de Beauvoir integrated
existentialism with other forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time, resulting in
alienation from fellow writers such as Camus.[citation needed]
Paul Tillich, an important existentialist theologian following Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, applied
existentialist concepts to Christian theology, and helped introduce existential theology to the general
public. His seminal work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and life's
absurdity, but puts forward the thesis that modern humans must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite
of life's absurdity. Rudolf Bultmann used Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's philosophy of existence to
demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian mythical concepts into existentialist concepts.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an existential phenomenologist, was for a time a companion of Sartre.
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) was recognized as a major statement of
French existentialism.[74] It has been said that Merleau-Ponty's work Humanism and Terror greatly
influenced Sartre. However, in later years they were to disagree irreparably, dividing many
existentialists such as de Beauvoir,[citation needed] who sided with Sartre.
Colin Wilson, an English writer, published his study The Outsider in 1956, initially to critical acclaim.
In this book and others (e.g. Introduction to the New Existentialism), he attempted to reinvigorate
what he perceived as a pessimistic philosophy and bring it to a wider audience. He was not,
however, academically trained, and his work was attacked by professional philosophers for lack of
rigor and critical standards.[75]
Back to Top

Introduction
Existentialism is a philosophy that emphasizes individual
existence, freedom and choice. It is the view that humans define their own
meaning in life, and try to make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational
universe. It focuses on the question of human existence, and the feeling that there

is no purpose or explanation at the core of existence. It holds that, as there is no

God or any other transcendent force, the only way to counter this nothingness (and
hence to find meaning in life) is by embracing existence.
Thus, Existentialism believes that individuals are entirely free and must take personal
responsibility for themselves (although with this responsibility comes angst, a
profound anguish or dread). It therefore emphasizes action, freedom and decision as
fundamental, and holds that the only way to rise above the essentially absurd
condition of humanity (which is characterized bysuffering and inevitable death) is by
exercising our personal freedom and choice (a complete rejection of Determinism).
Often, Existentialism as a movement is used to describe those who refuse to belong
to any school of thought, repudiating of theadequacy of any body of beliefs or systems,
claiming them to be superficial, academic and remote from life. Although it has much in
common with Nihilism, Existentialism is more a reaction against traditional
philosophies, such as Rationalism,Empiricism and Positivism, that seek to discover an
ultimate order and universal meaning in metaphysical principles or in the structure of
the observed world. It asserts that people actually make decisions based on what
has meaning to them, rather than what is rational.
Existentialism originated with the 19th Century philosophers Sren
Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, although neither used the term in their work. In
the 1940s and 1950s, French existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus (1913 - 1960), and Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986) wrote scholarly and
fictional works that popularized existential themes, such as dread, boredom,
alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment and nothingness.

Main Beliefs

Back to Top

Unlike Ren Descartes, who believed in the primacy of conciousness, Existentialists

assert that a human being is "thrown into" into a concrete, inveterate universe that
cannot be "thought away", and therefore existence ("being in the world") precedes
consciousness, and is the ultimate reality. Existence, then, is prior to
essence (essence is the meaning that may be ascribed to life), contrary
to traditional philosophical views dating back to the ancient Greeks. As Sartre put it: "At
first [Man] is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have
made what he will be."
Kierkegaard saw rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter their existential
anxiety, their fear of being in the world.Sartre saw rationality as a form of "bad faith", an
attempt by the self to impose structure on a fundamentally irrational and random
world of phenomena ("the other"). This bad faith hinders us from finding meaning in
freedom, and confines us within everyday experience.
Kierkegaard also stressed that individuals must choose their own way without the aid
of universal, objective standards.Friedrich Nietzsche further contended that the

individual must decide which situations are to count as moral situations. Thus, most
Existentialists believe that personal experience and acting on one's
own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth, and that the understanding of a
situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a detached,
objective observer (similar to the concept of Subjectivism).
According to Camus, when an individual's longing for order collides with the real
world's lack of order, the result is absurdity. Human beings are therefore subjects in
an indifferent, ambiguous and absurd universe, in which meaning is not provided by
thenatural order, but rather can be created (however provisionally and unstably) by
human actions and interpretations.
Existentialism can be atheistic, theological (or theistic) or agnostic. Some Existentialists,
like Nietzsche, proclaimed that "God is dead" and that the concept of God is obsolete.
Others, like Kierkegaard, were intensely religious, even if they did not feel able
tojustify it. The important factor for Existentialists is the freedom of choice to believe
or not to believe.

History of Existentialism

Back to Top

Existentialist-type themes appear in early Buddhist and Christian writings (including

those of St. Augustine and St.Thomas Aquinas). In the 17th Century, Blaise
Pascal suggested that, without a God, life would be meaningless, boring and
miserable, much as later Existentialists believed, although, unlike them, Pascal saw this
as a reason for the existence of a God. His near-contemporary, John Locke,
advocated individual autonomy and self-determination, but in the positive pursuit
of Liberalismand Individualism rather than in response to an Existentialist experience.
Existentialism in its currently recognizable form was inspired by the 19th Century
Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard, the German philosophers Friedrich
Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969) and Edmund Husserl, and
writers like the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) and the Czech Franz
Kafka (1883 - 1924). It can be argued that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur
Schopenhauer were also important influences on the development of Existentialism,
because the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were written in response or
in opposition to them.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, like Pascal before them, were interested in
people's concealment of the meaninglessness of life and their use of diversion to
escape from boredom. However, unlike Pascal, they considered the role of making free
choices on fundamental values and beliefs to be essential in the attempt to change
the nature and identity of the chooser. In Kierkegaard's case, this results in
the "knight of faith", who puts complete faith in himself and in God, as described in
his 1843 work "Fear and Trembling". In Nietzsche's case, the much
maligned "bermensch" (or "Superman")
attains superiority andtranscendence without resorting to the "other-worldliness" of

Christianity, in his books "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1885) and"Beyond Good and
Evil" (1887).
Martin Heidegger was an important early philosopher in the movement, particularly his
influential 1927 work "Being and Time", although he himself vehemently denied being
an existentialist in the Sartrean sense. His discussion of ontology is rooted in an
analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings, and his analysis
of authenticity and anxiety in modern culture make him very much an Existentialist in
the usual modern usage.
Existentialism came of age in the mid-20th Century, largely through
the scholarly and fictional works of the French existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus (1913 - 1960) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986). Maurice MerleauPonty(1908 - 1961) is another influential and often overlooked French Existentialist of
the period.
Sartre is perhaps the most well-known, as well as one of the few to have
actually accepted being called an "existentialist"."Being and Nothingness" (1943) is
his most important work, and his novels and plays, including "Nausea" (1938) and "No
Exit(1944), helped to popularize the movement.
In "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942), Albert Camus uses the analogy of the Greek
myth of Sisyphus (who is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, only to have it
roll to the bottom again each time) to exemplify the pointlessness of existence, but
shows that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by
continually applying himself to it.
Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life
alongside Sartre, wrote about feminist and existential ethics in her works,
including "The Second Sex" (1949) and "The Ethics of Ambiguity" (1947).
Although Sartre is considered by most to be the pre-eminent Existentialist, and by
many to be an important and innovative philosopher in his own right, others are
much less impressed by his contributions. Heidegger himself thought that Sartre had
merely taken his own work and regressed it back to the subject-object orientated
philosophy of Descartes and Husserl, which is exactly what Heidegger had been trying
to free philosophy from. Some see Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961) as a
betterExistentialist philosopher, particular for his incorporation of the body as our way of
being in the world, and for his more complete analysis of perception (two areas in
which Heidegger's work is often seen as deficient).

Criticisms of Existentialism

Back to Top

Herbert Marcuse (1898 - 1979) has criticized Existentialism, especially Sartre's "Being
and Nothingness", for projecting some features of living in a modern oppressive

society (features such as anxiety and meaninglessness) onto the nature of existence
itself.
Roger Scruton (1944 - ) has claimed that both Heidegger's concept
of inauthenticity and Sartre's concept of bad faith are bothself-inconsistent, in that
they deny any universal moral creed, yet speak of these concepts as if everyone
is bound to abide by them.
Logical Positivists, such as A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap (1891 - 1970), claim that
existentialists frequently become confusedover the verb "to be" (which
is meaningless if used without a predicate) and by the word "nothing" (which is
the negation of existence and therefore cannot be assummed to refer to something).
Marxists, especially in post-War France, found Existentialism to run counter to their
emphasis on the solidarity of human beings and their theory of economic
determinism. They further argued that Existentialism's emphasis on individual
choice leads tocontemplation rather than to action, and that only the bourgeoisie has
the luxury to make themselves what they are through their choices, so they considered
Existentialism to be a bourgeois philosophy.
Christian critics complain that Existentialism portrays humanity in the worst possible
light, overlooking the dignity and gracethat comes from being made in the image of
God. Also, according to Christian critics, Existentialists are unable to account for
the moral dimension of human life, and have no basis for an ethical theory if they
deny that humans are bound by thecommands of God. On the other hand, some
commentators have objected to Kierkegaard's continued espousal of Christianity,
despite his inability to effectively justify it.
In more general terms, the common use of pseudonymous characters in existentialist
writing can make it seem like the authors are unwilling to own their insights, and
are confusing philosophy with literature.

Existentialism
Existentialism is a catch-all term for those philosophers who consider the nature of the
human condition as a key philosophical problem and who share the view that this
problem is best addressed through ontology. This very broad definition will be clarified
by discussing seven key themes that existentialist thinkers address. Those philosophers
considered existentialists are mostly from the continent of Europe, and date from the
19th and 20th centuries. Outside philosophy, the existentialist movement is probably the
most well-known philosophical movement, and at least two of its members are among

the most famous philosophical personalities and widely read philosophical authors. It
has certainly had considerable influence outside philosophy, for example on
psychological theory and on the arts. Within philosophy, though, it is safe to say that
this loose movement considered as a whole has not had a great impact, although
individuals or ideas counted within it remain important. Moreover, most of the
philosophers conventionally grouped under this heading either never used, or actively
disavowed, the term 'existentialist'. Even Sartre himself once said: Existentialism? I
dont know what that is. So, there is a case to be made that the term insofar as it leads
us to ignore what is distinctive about philosophical positions and to conflate together
significantly different ideas does more harm than good.
In this article, however, it is assumed that something sensible can be said about
existentialism as a loosely defined movement. The article has three sections. First, we
outline a set of themes that define, albeit very broadly, existentialist concerns. This is
done with reference to the historical context of existentialism, which will help us to
understand why certain philosophical problems and methods were considered so
important. Second, we discuss individually six philosophers who are arguably its central
figures, stressing in these discussions the ways in which these philosophers approached
existentialist themes in distinctive ways. These figures, and many of the others we
mention, have full length articles of their own within the Encyclopedia. Finally, we
look very briefly at the influence of existentialism, especially outside philosophy.

Table of Contents
1. Key Themes of Existentialism
1.

Philosophy as a Way of Life

2.

Anxiety and Authenticity

3.

Freedom

4.

Situatedness

5.

Existence

6.

Irrationality/Absurdity

7.

The Crowd

b. Key Existentialist Philosophers

1.

Sren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) as an Existentialist Philosopher

2.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as an Existentialist Philosopher

3.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) as an Existentialist Philosopher

4.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) as an Existentialist Philosopher

5.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) as an Existentialist Philosopher

6.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) as an Existentialist Philosopher

b. The Influence of Existentialism

1.

The Arts and Psychology

2.

Philosophy

b. References and Further Reading

1.

General Introductions
2.

Anthologies

3.

Primary Bibliography

4.

Secondary Bibliography

5.

Other Works Cited

1. Key Themes of Existentialism

Although a highly diverse tradition of thought, seven themes can be identified that
provide some sense of overall unity. Here, these themes will be briefly introduced; they
can then provide us with an intellectual framework within which to discuss exemplary
figures within the history of existentialism.

a. Philosophy as a Way of Life

Philosophy should not be thought of primarily either as an attempt to investigate and
understand the self or the world, or as a special occupation that concerns only a few.
Rather, philosophy must be thought of as fully integrated within life. To be sure, there
may need to be professional philosophers, who develop an elaborate set of methods and
concepts (Sartre makes this point frequently) but life can be lived philosophically
without a technical knowledge of philosophy. Existentialist thinkers tended to identify
two historical antecedents for this notion. First, the ancient Greeks, and particularly the
figure of Socrates but also the Stoics and Epicureans. Socrates was not only nonprofessional, but in his pursuit of the good life he tended to eschew the formation of a
'system' or 'theory', and his teachings took place often in public spaces. In this, the
existentialists were hardly unusual. In the 19 th and 20th centuries, the rapid expansion of
industrialisation and advance in technology were often seen in terms of an alienation of
the human from nature or from a properly natural way of living (for example, thinkers
of German and English romanticism).

The second influence on thinking of philosophy as a way of life was German

Idealism after Kant. Partly as a response to the 18 th century Enlightenment, and under
the influence of the Neoplatonists, Schelling and Hegel both thought of philosophy as an
activity that is an integral part of the history of human beings, rather than outside of life
and the world, looking on. Later in the 19 th century, Marx famously criticised previous
philosophy by saying that the point of philosophy is not to know things even to know
things about activity but to change them. The concept of philosophy as a way of life
manifests itself in existentialist thought in a number of ways. Let us give several
examples, to which we will return in the sections that follow. First, the existentialists
often undertook a critique of modern life in terms of the specialisation of both manual
and intellectual labour. Specialisation included philosophy. One consequence of this is
that many existentialist thinkers experimented with different styles or genres of writing
in order to escape the effects of this specialisation. Second, a notion that we can call
'immanence': philosophy studies life from the inside. For Kierkegaard, for example, the
fundamental truths of my existence are not representations not, that is, ideas,
propositions or symbols the meaning of which can be separated from their origin.
Rather, the truths of existence are immediately lived, felt and acted. Likewise, for
Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is essential to recognise that the philosopher investigating
human existence is, him or herself, an existing human. Third, the nature of life itself is a
perennial existentialist concern and, more famously (in Heidegger and in Camus), also
the significance of death.

b. Anxiety and Authenticity

A key idea here is that human existence is in some way 'on its own'; anxiety (or anguish)
is the recognition of this fact. Anxiety here has two important implications. First, most
generally, many existentialists tended to stress the significance of emotions or feelings,
in so far as they were presumed to have a less culturally or intellectually mediated
relation to one's individual and separate existence. This idea is found in Kierkegaard, as
we mentioned above, and in Heidegger's discussion of 'mood'; it is also one reason why
existentialism had an influence on psychology. Second, anxiety also stands for a form of
existence that is recognition of being on its own. What is meant by 'being on its own'
varies among philosophers. For example, it might mean the irrelevance (or even
negative influence) of rational thought, moral values, or empirical evidence, when it
comes to making fundamental decisions concerning one's existence. As we shall see,
Kierkegaard sees Hegel's account of religion in terms of the history of absolute spirit as

an exemplary confusion of faith and reason. Alternatively, it might be a more specifically

theological claim: the existence of a transcendent deity is not relevant to (or is positively
detrimental to) such decisions (a view broadly shared by Nietzsche and Sartre). Finally,
being on its own might signify the uniqueness of human existence, and thus the fact that
it cannot understand itself in terms of other kinds of existence (Heidegger and Sartre).
Related to anxiety is the concept of authenticity, which is let us say the existentialist spin
on the Greek notion of 'the good life'. As we shall see, the authentic being would be able
to recognise and affirm the nature of existence (we shall shortly specify some of the
aspects of this, such as absurdity and freedom). Not, though, recognise the nature of
existence as an intellectual fact, disengaged from life; but rather, the authentic being
lives in accordance with this nature. The notion of authenticity is sometimes seen as
connected to individualism. This is only reinforced by the contrast with a theme we will
discuss below, that of the 'crowd'. Certainly, if authenticity involves 'being on one's own',
then there would seem to be some kind of value in celebrating and sustaining one's
difference and independence from others. However, many existentialists see
individualism as a historical and cultural trend (for example Nietzsche), or dubious
political value (Camus), rather than a necessary component of authentic existence.
Individualism tends to obscure the particular types of collectivity that various
existentialists deem important.
For many existentialists, the conditions of the modern world make authenticity
especially difficult. For example, many existentialists would join other philosophers
(such as the Frankfurt School) in condemning an instrumentalist conception of reason
and value. The utilitarianism of Mill measured moral value and justice also in terms of
the consequences of actions. Later liberalism would seek to absorb nearly all functions
of political and social life under the heading of economic performance. Evaluating solely
in terms of the measurable outcomes of production was seen as reinforcing the
secularisation of the institutions of political, social or economic life; and reinforcing also
the abandonment of any broader sense of the spiritual dimension (such an idea is found
acutely in Emerson, and is akin to the concerns of Kierkegaard). Existentialists such as
Martin Heidegger, Hanna Arendt or Gabriel Marcel viewed these social movements in
terms of a narrowing of the possibilities of human thought to the instrumental or
technological. This narrowing involved thinking of the world in terms of resources, and
thinking of all human action as a making, or indeed as a machine-like 'function'.

c. Freedom
The next key theme is freedom. Freedom can usefully be linked to the concept of
anguish, because my freedom is in part defined by the isolation of my decisions from
any determination by a deity, or by previously existent values or knowledge. Many
existentialists identified the 19th and 20thcenturies as experiencing a crisis of values. This
might be traced back to familiar reasons such as an increasingly secular society, or the
rise of scientific or philosophical movements that questioned traditional accounts of
value (for example Marxism or Darwinism), or the shattering experience of two world
wars and the phenomenon of mass genocide. It is important to note, however, that for
existentialism these historical conditions do not create the problem of anguish in the
face of freedom, but merely cast it into higher relief. Likewise, freedom entails
something like responsibility, for myself and for my actions. Given that my situation is
one of being on its own recognised in anxiety then both my freedom and my
responsibility are absolute. The isolation that we discussed above means that there is
nothing else that acts through me, or that shoulders my responsibility. Likewise, unless
human existence is to be understood as arbitrarily changing moment to moment, this
freedom and responsibility must stretch across time. Thus, when I exist as an
authentically free being, I assume responsibility for my whole life, for a project or a
commitment. We should note here that many of the existentialists take on a broadly
Kantian notion of freedom: freedom as autonomy. This means that freedom, rather
than being randomness or arbitrariness, consists in the binding of oneself to a law, but a
law that is given by the self in recognition of its responsibilities. This borrowing from
Kant, however, is heavily qualified by the next theme.

d. Situatedness
The next common theme we shall call situatedness. Although my freedom is absolute, it
always takes place in a particular context. My body and its characteristics, my
circumstances in a historical world, and my past, all weigh upon freedom. This is what
makes freedom meaningful. Suppose I tried to exist as free, while pretending to be in
abstraction from the situation. In that case I will have no idea what possibilities are
open to me and what choices need to be made, here and now. In such a case, my
freedom will be nave or illusory. This concrete notion of freedom has its philosophical
genesis in Hegel, and is generally contrasted to the pure rational freedom described by
Kant. Situatedness is related to a notion we discussed above under the heading of

philosophy as a way of life: the necessity of viewing or understanding life and existence
from the inside. For example, many 19th century intellectuals were interested in ancient
Greece, Rome, the Medieval period, or the orient, as alternative models of a less spoiled,
more integrated form of life. Nietzsche, to be sure, shared these interests, but he did so
not uncritically: because the human condition is characterised by being historically
situated, it cannot simply turn back the clock or decide all at once to be other than it is
(Sartre especially shares this view). Heidegger expresses a related point in this way:
human existence cannot be abstracted from its world because being-in-the-world is part
of the ontological structure of that existence. Many existentialists take my concretely
individual body, and the specific type of life that my body lives, as a primary fact about
me (for example, Nietzsche, Scheler or Merleau-Ponty). I must also be situated socially:
each of my acts says something about how I view others but, reciprocally, each of their
acts is a view about what I am. My freedom is always situated with respect to the
judgements of others. This particular notion comes from Hegels analysis of
recognition, and is found especially in Sartre, de Beauvoir and Jaspers. Situatedness in
general also has an important philosophical antecedent in Marx: economic and political
conditions are not contingent features with respect to universal human nature, but
condition that nature from the ground up.

e. Existence
Although, of course, existentialism takes its name from the philosophical theme of
'existence', this does not entail that there is homogeneity in the manner existence is to
be understood. One point on which there is agreement, though, is that the existence
with which we should be concerned here is not just any existent thing, but human
existence. There is thus an important difference between distinctively human existence
and anything else, and human existence is not to be understood on the model of things,
that is, as objects of knowledge. One might think that this is an old idea, rooted in
Plato's distinction between matter and soul, or Descartes' between extended and
thinking things. But these distinctions appear to be just differences between two types of
things. Descartes in particular, however, is often criticised by the existentialists for
subsuming both under the heading 'substance', and thus treating what is distinctive in
human existence as indeed a thing or object, albeit one with different properties.
(Whether the existentialist characterisation of Plato or Descartes is accurate is a
different question.) The existentialists thus countered the Platonic or Cartesian
conception with a model that resembles more the Aristotelian as developed in

theNichomachean Ethics. The latter idea arrives in existentialist thought filtered

through Leibniz and Spinoza and the notion of a striving for existence. Equally
important is the elevation of the practical above the theoretical in German Idealists.
Particularly in Kant, who stressed the primacy of the 'practical', and then in Fichte and
early Schelling, we find the notion that human existence isaction. Accordingly, in
Nietzsche and Sartre we find the notion that the human being is all and only what that
being does. My existence consists of forever bringing myself into being and,
correlatively, fleeing from the dead, inert thing that is the totality of my past actions.
Although my acts are free, I am not free not to act; thus existence is characterised also
by 'exigency' (Marcel). For many existentialists, authentic existence involves a certain
tension be recognised and lived through, but not resolved: this tension might be
between the animal and the rational (important in Nietzsche) or between facticity and
transcendence (Sartre and de Beauvoir).
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the human sciences (such as psychology, sociology or
economics) were coming to be recognised as powerful and legitimate sciences. To some
extend at least their assumptions and methods seemed to be borrowed from the natural
sciences. While philosophers such as Dilthey and later Gadamer were concerned to show
that the human sciences had to have a distinctive method, the existentialists were
inclined to go further. The free, situated human being is not an object of knowledge in
the sense the human always exists as the possibility of transcending any knowledge of it.
There is a clear relation between such an idea and the notion of the 'transcendence of
the other' found in the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas.

f. Irrationality/Absurdity
Among the most famous ideas associated with existentialism is that of 'absurdity'.
Human existence might be described as 'absurd' in one of the following senses. First,
many existentialists argued that nature as a whole has no design, no reason for existing.
Although the natural world can apparently be understood by physical science or
metaphysics, this might be better thought of as 'description' than either understanding
or explanation. Thus, the achievements of the natural sciences also empty nature of
value and meaning. Unlike a created cosmos, for example, we cannot expect the
scientifically described cosmos to answer our questions concerning value or meaning.
Moreover, such description comes at the cost of a profound falsification of nature:
namely, the positing of ideal entities such as 'laws of nature', or the conflation of all

reality under a single model of being. Human beings can and should become profoundly
aware of this lack of reason and the impossibility of an immanent understanding of it.
Camus, for example, argues that the basic scene of human existence is its confrontation
with this mute irrationality. A second meaning of the absurd is this: my freedom will
not only be undetermined by knowledge or reason, but from the point of view of the
latter my freedom will even appear absurd. Absurdity is thus closely related to the theme
of 'being on its own', which we discussed above under the heading of anxiety. Even if I
choose to follow a law that I have given myself, my choice of law will appear absurd, and
likewise will my continuously reaffirmed choice to follow it. Third, human existence as
action is doomed to always destroy itself. A free action, once done, is no longer free; it
has become an aspect of the world, a thing. The absurdity of human existence then
seems to lie in the fact that in becoming myself (a free existence) I must be what I am
not (a thing). If I do not face up to this absurdity, and choose to be or pretend to be
thing-like, I exist inauthentically (the terms in this formulation are Sartre's).

g. The Crowd
Existentialism generally also carries a social or political dimension. Insofar as he or she
is authentic, the freedom of the human being will show a certain 'resolution' or
'commitment', and this will involve also the being and particularly the authentic being
of others. For example, Nietzsche thus speaks of his (or Zarathustra's) work in aiding
the transformation of the human, and there is also in Nietzsche a striking analysis of the
concept of friendship; for Heidegger, there must be an authentic mode of being-with
others, although he does not develop this idea at length; the social and political aspect of
authentic commitment is much more clear in Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus.
That is the positive side of the social or political dimension. However, leading up to this
positive side, there is a description of the typical forms that inauthentic social or
political existence takes. Many existentialists employ terms such as 'crowd', 'horde'
(Scheler) or the 'masses' (Jos Ortega y Gasset). Nietzsche's deliberately provocative
expression, 'the herd', portrays the bulk of humanity not only as animal, but as docile
and domesticated animals. Notice that these are all collective terms: inauthenticity
manifests itself as de-individuated or faceless. Instead of being formed authentically in
freedom and anxiety, values are just accepted from others because that is what
everybody does. These terms often carry a definite historical resonance, embodying a
critique of specifically modern modes of human existence. All of the following might be

seen as either causes or symptoms of a world that is 'fallen' or 'broken' (Marcel): the
technology of mass communication (Nietzsche is particularly scathing about
newspapers and journalists; in Two Ages, Kierkegaard says something very similar),
empty religious observances, the specialisation of labour and social roles, urbanisation
and industrialisation. The theme of the crowd poses a question also to the positive social
or political dimension of existentialism: how could a collective form of existence ever be
anything other than inauthentic? The 19th and 20th century presented a number of mass
political ideologies which might be seen as posing a particularly challenging
environment for authentic and free existence. For example, nationalism came in for
criticism particularly by Nietzsche. Socialism and communism: after WWII, Sartre was
certainly a communist, but even then unafraid to criticise both the French communist
party and the Soviet Union for rigid or inadequately revolutionary thinking. Democracy:
Aristotle in book 5 of his Politics distinguishes between democracy and ochlocracy,
which latter essentially means rule by those incapable of ruling even themselves. Many
existentialists would identify the latter with the American and especially French concept
of
'democracy'.
Nietzsche
and
Ortega
y
Gasset
both
espoused
a
broadlyaristocratic criterion for social and political leadership.
2. Key Existentialist Philosophers

a. Sren Kierkegaard
Philosopher

(1813-1855)

as

an

Existentialist

Kierkegaard was many things: philosopher, religious writer, satirist, psychologist,

journalist, literary critic and generally considered the father of existentialism. Being
born (in Copenhagen) to a wealthy family enabled him to devote his life to the pursuits
of his intellectual interests as well as to distancing himself from the everyday man of
his times.
Kierkegaards most important works are pseudonymous, written under fictional names,
often very obviously fictional. The issue of pseudonymity has been variously interpreted
as a literary device, a personal quirk or as an illustration of the constant tension between
the philosophical truth and existential or personal truth. We have already seen that for
the existentialists it is of equal importance what one says and the way in which
something is said. This forms part of the attempt to return to a more authentic way of
philosophising, firstly exemplified by the Greeks. In a work like Either/Or (primarily a

treatise against the Hegelians) theoretical reflections are followed by reflections on how
to seduce girls. The point is to stress the distance between the anonymously and
logically produced truths of the logicians and the personal truths of existing individuals.
Every pseudonymous author is a symbol for an existing individual and at times his very
name is the key to the mysteries of his existence (like in the case of Johanes de
Silentio, fictional author of Fear and Trembling, where the mystery of Abrahams
actions cannot be told, being a product of and belonging to silence).
Kierkegaard has been associated with a notion of truth as subjective (or personal); but
what does this mean? The issue is linked with his notorious confrontation with the
Danish Church and the academic environment of his days. Kierkegaards work takes
place against the background of an academia dominated by Hegelian dialectics and a
society which reduces the communication with the divine to the everyday observance of
the ritualistic side of an institutionalized Christianity. Hegel is for Kierkegaard his archenemy not only because of what he writes but also what he represents. Hegel is guilty for
Kierkegaard because he reduced the living truth of Christianity (the fact that God
suffered and died on the Cross) to just another moment, which necessarily will be
overcome, in the dialectical development of the Spirit. While Hegel treats God as
a Begrif (a concept), for Kierkegaard the truth of Christianity signifies the very
paradoxicality of faith: that is, that it is possible for the individual to go beyond the
ethical and nevertheless or rather because of this very act of disobedience to be loved
by God. Famously, for Hegel all that is real is rational where rationality means the
historically articulated, dialectical progression of Spirit whereas for Kierkegaard the
suspension of rationality is the very secret of Christianity. Against the cold logic of the
Hegelian system Kierkegaard seeks a truth which is truth for me (Kierkegaard
1996:32). Christianity in particular represents the attempt to offer ones life to the
service of the divine. This cannot be argued, it can only be lived. While a theologian will
try to argue for the validity of his positions by arguing and counter-arguing, a true
Christian will try to live his life the way Jesus lived it. This evidently marks the
continuation of the Hellenic idea of philosophy as a way of life, exemplified in the
person of Socrates who did not write treatises, but who died for his ideas. Before the
logical concepts of the theologians (in the words of Martin Heidegger who was hugely
influenced by Kierkegaard) man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play
music and dance before this god (Heidegger 2002:42). The idea of subjective truth
will have serious consequences to the philosophical understanding of man. Traditionally
defined as animale rationale (the rational animal) by Aristotle and for a long time

worshiped as such by generations of philosophical minds, Kierkegaard comes now to

redefine the human as the passionate animal. What counts in man is the intensity of his
emotions and his willingness to believe (contra the once all powerful reason) in that
which cannot be understood. The opening up by Kierkegaard of thisterra incognita of
mans inner life will come to play a major role for later existentialists (most importantly
for Nietzsche) and will bring to light the failings and the weaknesses of an overoptimistic (because modelled after the Natural sciences) model of philosophy which was
taught totalk a lot concerning the truth of the human, when all it understood about the
human was a mutilated version.
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve lived in a state of innocence in communication
with God and in harmony with their physical environment. The expulsion from the
Garden opened up a wide range of new possibilities for them and thus the problem of
anxiety arose. Adam (the Hebrew word for man) is now free to determine through his
actions the route of things. Naturally, there is a tension here. The human, created in
Gods image, is an infinite being. Like God he also can choose and act according to his
will. Simultaneously, though, he is a finite being since he is restricted by his body,
particular socioeconomic conditions and so forth. This tension between the finite and
infinite is the source of anxiety. But unlike a Hegelian analysis, Kierkegaard does not
look for a way out from anxiety; on the contrary he stresses its positive role in the
flourishing of the human. As he characteristically puts it: Because he is a synthesis, he
can be in anxiety; and the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man
(Kierkegaard 1980:154). The prioritization of anxiety as a fundamental trait of the
human being is a typical existentialist move, eager to assert the positive role of emotions
for human life.
Perhaps the most famous work of Kierkegaard was Fear and Trembling, a short book
which exhibits many of the issues raised by him throughout his career. Fear and
Trembling retells the story of the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham.
God tells Abraham that in order to prove his faith he has to sacrifice his only son.
Abraham obeys, but at the last moment God intervenes and saves Isaac. What is the
moral of the story? According to our moral beliefs, shouldnt Abraham refuse to execute
Gods vicious plan? Isnt one of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity the respect to the
life of other? The answer is naturally affirmative. Abraham should refuse God, and he
should respect the ethical law. Then Abraham would be in a good relation with the Law
itself as in the expression a law abiding citizen. On the contrary what Abraham tries to

achieve is a personal relation with the author of the moral law. This author is neither a
symbolic figure nor an abstract idea; he is someone with a name. The name of God is
the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton (YHVE), the unpronounceability indicates the
simultaneous closeness and distance of the great Other. The Christian God then, the
author of the moral law at his willsuspends the law and demands his unlawful wish be
obeyed. Jacques Derrida notes that the temptation is now for Abraham the ethical law
itself (Derrida 1998:162): he must resist ethics, this is the mad logic of God. The story
naturally raises many problems. Is not such a subjectivist model of truth and religion
plainly dangerous? What if someone was to support his acts of violence as a command of
God? Kierkegaards response would be to suggest that it is only because Abraham loved
Isaac with all his heart that the sacrifice could take place. He must love Isaac with his
whole soul....only then can he sacrifice him (Kierkegaard 1983:74). Abrahams faith is
proved by the strength of his love for his son. However, this doesnt fully answer the
question of legitimacy, even if we agree that Abraham believed that God loved him so
that he would somehow spare him. Kierkegaard also differentiates between the act of
Abraham and the act of a tragic hero (like Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter
Iphigenia). The tragic heros act is a product of calculation. What is better to do? What
would be more beneficial? Abraham stands away from all sorts of calculations, he stands
alone, that is, free in front of the horror religiosus, the price and the reward of faith.

b. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as an Existentialist

Philosopher
I know my lot. Some day my name will be linked to the memory of something
monstrous, of a crisis as yet unprecedented on earth... (Nietzsche 2007:88).
Remarkably, what in 1888 sounded like megalomania came some years later to be
realized. The name Nietzsche has been linked with an array of historical events,
philosophical concepts and widespread popular legends. Above all, Nietzsche has
managed somehow to associate his name with the turmoil of a crisis. For a while this
crisis was linked to the events of WWII. The exploitation of his teaching by the Nazi
ideologues (notably Alfred Rosenberg and Alfred Baeumler), although utterly
misdirected, arguably had its source in Nietzsches own aristocratic radicalism. More
generally, the crisis refers to the prospect of a future lacking of any meaning. This is a
common theme for all the existentialists to be sure. The prospect of millennia
of nihilism (the devaluation of the highest values) inaugurates for Nietzsche the era in
which the human itself, for the first time in its history, is called to give meaning both to

its own existence and to the existence of the world. This is an event of a cataclysmic
magnitude, from now on there are neither guidelines to be followed, lighthouses to
direct us, and no right answers but only experiments to be conducted with unknown
results.
Many existentialists, in their attempt to differentiate the value of individual existence
from the alienating effects of the masses, formed an uneasy relation with the value of the
everyday man. The common man was thought to be lacking in will, taste in matter of
aesthetics, andindividuality in the sense that the assertion of his existence comes
exclusively from his participation in larger groups and from the herd mentality with
which these groups infuse their members. Nietzsche believed that men in society are
divided and ordered according to their willingness and capacity to participate in a life of
spiritual and cultural transformation. Certainly not everyone wishes this participation
and Nietzsches condemnation of those unwilling to challenge their fundamental beliefs
is harsh; however it would be a mistake to suggest that Nietzsche thought their presence
dispensable. In various aphorisms he stresses the importance of the common as a
necessary prerequisite for both the growth and the value of the exceptional. Such an
idea clashes with our modern sensitivities (themselves a product of a particular
training). However, one has to recognize that there are no philosophers without
presuppositions, and that Nietzsches insistence on the value of the exceptional marks
his own beginning and his own understanding of the mission of thought.
Despite the dubious politics that the crisis of meaning gave rise to, the crisis itself is only
an after-effect of a larger and deeper challenge that Nietzsches work identifies and
poses. For Nietzsche the crisis of meaning is inextricably linked to the crisis of religious
consciousness in the West. Whereas for Kierkegaard the problem of meaning was to be
resolved through the individuals relation to the Divine, for Nietzsche the militantly
anti-Christian, the problem of meaning is rendered possible at all because of the
demise of the Divine. As he explains in The Genealogy of Morality, it is only after the
cultivation of truth as a value by the priest that truth comes to question its own value
and function. What truth discovers is that at the ground of all truth lies an
unquestionable faith in the value of truth. Christianity is destroyed when it is pushed to
tell the truth about itself, when the illusions of the old ideals are revealed. What is called
The death of God is also then the death of truth (though not of the value
of truthfulness); this is an event of immense consequences for the future.

But one has to be careful here. Generations of readers, by concentrating on the event of
the actual announcement of the 'death of God', have completely missed madmans
woeful mourning which follows the announcement. Where is God? he cried; Ill tell
you! We have killed him you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do
this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where
is it moving? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? (Nietzsche 2001:125). The
above sentences are very far from constituting a cheerful declaration: no one is happy
here! Nietzsches atheism has nothing to do with the naive atheism of others (for
example Sartre) who rush to affirm their freedom as if their petty individuality were able
to fill the vast empty space left by the absence of God. Nietzsche is not naive and because
he is not naive he is rather pessimistic. What the death of God really announces is the
demise of the human as we know it. One has to think of this break in the history of the
human in Kantian terms. Kant famously described Enlightenment as mans emergence
from his self-incurred immaturity (Kant 1991:54). Similarly Nietzsche believes that the
demise of the divine could be the opportunity for the emergence of a being which
derives the meaning of its existence from within itself and not from some authority
external to it. If the meaning of the human derived from God then, with the universe
empty, man cannot take the place of the absent God. This empty space can only be
filled by something greater and fuller, which in the Nietzschean jargon means the
greatest unity of contradictory forces. That is the bermensch (Overhuman) which for
Nietzsche signifies the attempt towards the cultural production of a human being which
will be aware of his dual descent from animality and from rationality without
prioritizing either one, but keeping them in anagonistic balance so that through
struggle new and exciting forms of human existence can be born.
Nietzsche was by training a Klassische Philologe (the rough equivalent Anglosaxon
would be an expert in classics the texts of the ancient Greek and Roman authors).
Perhaps because of his close acquaintance with the ancient writers, he became sensitive
to a quite different understanding of philosophical thinking to that of his
contemporaries. For the Greeks, philosophical questioning takes place within the
perspective of a certain choice of life. There is no life and then quite separately the
theoretical (theoria: from thea view, and horan to see) or 'from a distance'
contemplation of phenomena. Philosophical speculation is the result of a certain way of
life and the attempted justification of this life. Interestingly Kant encapsulates this
attitude in the following passage: When will you finally begin to live virtuously? said

Plato to an old man who told him he was attending classes on virtue. The point is not
always to speculate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge. Today,
however, he who lives in conformity with what he teaches is taken for a dreamer (Kant
in Hadot 2002:xiii). We have to understand Nietzsches relation to philosophy within
this context not only because it illustrates a stylistically different contemplation but
because it demonstrates an altogether different way of philosophizing. Thus in Twilight
of the Idols Nietzsche accuses philosophers for their Egyptism, the fact that they turn
everything into a concept under evaluation. All that philosophers have been handling
for thousands of years is conceptual mummies; nothing real has ever left their hands
alive (Nietzsche 1998:16). Philosophical concepts are valuable insofar as they serve a
flourishing life, not as academic exercises. Under the new model of philosophy the old
metaphysical and moral questions are to be replaced by new questions concerning
history, genealogy, environmental conditions and so forth. Let us take a characteristic
passage from 1888: I am interested in a question on which the salvation of humanity
depends more than on any curio of the theologians: the question ofnutrition. For ease
of use, one can put it in the following terms: how do you personally have to nourish
yourself in order to attain your maximum of strength, of virt in the Renaissance style,
of moraline-free virtue? (Nietzsche 2007:19).
What is Nietzsche telling us here? Two things: firstly that, following the tradition of
Spinoza, the movement from transcendence to immanence passes through the
rehabilitation of the body. To say that, however, does not imply a simple-minded
materialism. When Spinoza tells nobody as yet has determined the limits of the bodys
capabilities (Spinoza 2002: 280) he is not writing about something like bodily strength
but to the possibility of an emergence of a body liberated from the sedimentation of
culture and memory. This archetypical body is indeed as yet unknown and we stand in
ignorance of its abilities. The second thing that Nietzsche is telling us in the above
passage is that this new immanent philosophy necessarily requires a new ethics. One
has to be clear here because of the many misunderstandings of Nietzschean ethics.
Nietzsche is primarily a philosopher of ethics but ethics here refers to the possible
justification of a way of life, which way of life in turn justifies human existence on earth.
For Nietzsche, ethics does not refer to moral codes and guidelines on how to live ones
life. Morality, which Nietzsche rejects, refers to the obsessive need (a need or
an instinct can also be learned according to Nietzsche) of the human to preserve its own
species and to regard its species as higher than the other animals. In short morality is
arrogant. A Nietzschean ethics is an ethics of modesty. It places the human back where

it belongs, among the other animals. However to say that is not to equate the human
with the animal. Unlike non-human animals men are products of history that is to say
products of memory. That is their burden and their responsibility.
In the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche explains morality as a system aiming at the
taming of the human animal. Moralitys aim is the elimination of the creative power of
animal instincts and the establishment of a life protected within the cocoon of ascetic
ideals. These 'ideals' are all those values and ideologies made to protect man against the
danger of nihilism, the state in which man finds no answer to the question of his
existence. Morality clings to the preservation of the species man; morality stubbornly
denies the very possibility of an open-ended future for humans. If we could summarize
Nietzsches philosophical anthropology in a few words, we would say that for Nietzsche
it is necessary to attempt (there are no guarantees here) to think of the human not as an
end-in-itself but only as a means to something ...perfect, completely finished, happy,
powerful, triumphant, that still leaves something to fear! (Nietzsche 2007:25).

c. Martin Heidegger
Philosopher

(1889-1976)

as

an

Existentialist

Heidegger exercised an unparalleled influence on modern thought. Without knowledge

of his work recent developments in modern European philosophy (Sartre, Gadamer,
Arendt, Marcuse, Derrida, Foucault et al.) simply do not make sense. He remains
notorious for his involvement with National Socialism in the 1930s. Outside European
philosophy, Heidegger is only occasionally taken seriously, and is sometimes actually
ridiculed (famously the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer called him a charlatan).
In 1945 in Paris Jean-Paul Sartre gave a public lecture with the title Existentialism is a
Humanism where he defended the priority of action and the position that it is a mans
actions which define his humanity. In 1946, Jean Beaufret in a letter to Heidegger poses
a number of questions concerning the link between humanism and the recent
developments of existentialist philosophy in France. Heideggers response is a letter to
Beaufret which in 1947 is published in a book form with the title Letter on Humanism.
There he repudiates any possible connection of his philosophy with the existentialism of
Sartre. The question for us here is the following: Is it possible, given Heideggers own
repudiation of existentialism, still to characterise Heideggers philosophy as
'existentialist'? The answer here is that Heidegger can be classified as an existentialist

thinker despite all his differences from Sartre. Our strategy is to stress Heideggers
connection with some key existentialist concerns, which we introduced above under the
labels Existence, Anxiety and the Crowd.
We have seen above that a principle concern of all existentialists was to affirm the
priority of individual existence and to stress that human existence is to be investigated
with methods otherthan those of the natural sciences. This is also one of Heideggers
principle concerns. His magnum opus Being and Time is an investigation into the
meaning of Being as that manifests itself through the human being, Dasein. The
sciences have repeatedly asked What is a man? What is a car? What is an emotion?
they have nevertheless failed and because of the nature of science, had to fail to ask
the question which grounds all those other questions. This question is what is the
meaning of (that) Being which is not an entity (like other beings, for example a chair, a
car, a rock) and yet through it entities have meaning at all? Investigating the question of
the meaning of Being we discover that it arises only because it is made possible by the
human being which poses the question. Dasein has already a (pre-conceptual)
understanding of Being because it is the placewhere Being manifests itself. Unlike the
traditional understanding of the human as ahypokeimenon (Aristotle) what through
the filtering of Greek thought by the Romans becomessubstantia, that which supports
all entities and qualities as their base and their ground Dasein refers to the way which
human beings are. The essence of Dasein lies in its existence (Heidegger 1962: 67) and
the existence of Dasein is not fixed like the existence of a substance is. This is why
human beings locate a place which nevertheless remains unstable and unfixed. The
virtual place that Dasein occupies is not empty. It is filled with beings
which ontologically structure the very possibility of Dasein. Dasein exists as in-theworld. World is not something separate from Dasein; rather, Dasein cannot be
understood outside the referential totality which constitutes it. Heidegger repeats here a
familiar existentialist pattern regarding the situatedness of experience.
Sartre, by contrast, comes from the tradition of Descartes and to this tradition remains
faithful. From Heidegger's perspective, Sartres strategy of affirming the priority of
existence over essence is a by-product of the tradition of Renaissance humanism which
wishes to assert the importance of man as the highest and most splendid of finite beings.
Sartrean existence refers to the fact that a human is whereas Heideggers eksistence refers to the way with which Dasein is thrown into a world of referential
relations and as such Dasein is claimed by Being to guard its truth. Sartre, following

Descartes, thinks of the human as a substance producing or sustaining entities,

Heidegger on the contrary thinks of the human as a passivity which accepts the call of
Being. Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being (Heidegger
1993:245). The Heideggerian priority then is Being, and Daseins importance lies in its
receptiveness to the call of Being.
For Kierkegaard anxiety defines the possibility of responsibility, the exodus of man from
the innocence of Eden and his participation to history. But the birthplace of anxiety is
the experience of nothingness, the state in which every entity is experienced as
withdrawn from its functionality. Nothing ... gives birth to anxiety (Kierkegaard
1980:41). In anxiety we do not fear something in particular but we experience the terror
of a vacuum in which is existence is thrown. Existentialist thinkers are interested in
anxiety because anxiety individualizes one (it is when I feel Angst more than everything
that I come face to face with my own individual existence as distinct from all other
entities around me). Heidegger thinks that one of the fundamental ways with which
Dasein understands itself in the world is through an array of moods. Dasein always
finds itself (befinden sich) in a certain mood. Man is not a thinking thing deassociated from the world, as in Cartesian metaphysics, but a being which finds itself in
various moods such as anxiety or boredom. For the Existentialists, primarily and for the
most part I dont exist because I think (recall Descartes famous formula) but because
my moods reveal to me fundamental truths of my existence. Like Kierkegaard,
Heidegger also believes that anxiety is born out of the terror of nothingness. The
obstinacy of the nothing and nowhere within-the-world means as a phenomenon
that the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety (Heidegger
1962:231). For Kierkegaard the possibility of anxiety reveals mans dual nature and
because of this duality man can be saved. If a human being were a beast or an angel, he
could not be in anxiety. Because he is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety; and the more
profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man (Kierkegaard 1980:155). Equally for
Heidegger anxiety manifests Daseins possibility to live an authentic existence since it
realizes that the crowd of others (what Heidegger calls the They) cannot offer any
consolation to the drama of existence.
In this article we have discussed the ambiguous or at times downright critical attitude of
many existentialists toward the uncritical and unreflecting masses of people who, in a
wholly anti-Kantian and thus also anti-Enlightenment move, locate the meaning of their
existence in an external authority. They thus give up their (purported) autonomy as

rational beings. For Heidegger, Dasein for the most part lives inauthentically in that
Dasein is absorbed in a way of life produced by others, not by Dasein itself. We take
pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see and judge about
literature and art as they see and judge... (Heidegger 1962:164). To be sure this mode
of existence, the They (Das Man) is one of the existentialia, it is an a priori condition of
possibility of the Dasein which means that inauthenticity is inscribed into the mode of
being of Dasein, it does not come from the outside as a bad influence which could be
erased. Heideggers language is ambiguous on the problem of inauthenticity and the
reader has to make his mind on the status of the They. A lot has been said on the
possible connections of Heideggers philosophy with his political engagements.
Although it is always a risky business to read the works of great philosophers as political
manifestos, it seems prima facie evident that Heideggers thought in this area deserves
the close investigation it has received.
Heidegger was a highly original thinker. His project was nothing less than the
overcoming of Western metaphysics through the positing of the forgotten question of
being. He stands in a critical relation to past philosophers but simultaneously he is
heavily indebted to them, much more than he would like to admit. This is not to
question his originality, it is to recognize that thought is not an ex nihilo production; it
comes as a response to things past, and aims towards what is made possible through
that past.

d. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) as an Existentialist Philosopher

In the public consciousness, at least, Sartre must surely be the central figure of
existentialism. All the themes that we introduced above come together in his work. With
the possible exception of Nietzsche, his writings are the most widely anthologised
(especially the lovely, if oversimplifying, lecture 'Existentialism and Humanism') and his
literary works are widely read (especially the novelNausea) or performed. Although
uncomfortable in the limelight, he was nevertheless the very model of a public
intellectual, writing hundreds of short pieces for public dissemination and taking
resolutely independent and often controversial stands on major political events. His
writings that are most clearly existentialist in character date from Sartre's early and
middle period, primarily the 1930s and 1940s. From the 1950s onwards, Sartre moved
his existentialism towards a philosophy the purpose of which was to understand the
possibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics.

Sartre was in his late 20s when he first encountered phenomenology, specifically the
philosophical ideas of Edmund Husserl. (We should point out that Heidegger was also
deeply influenced by Husserl, but it is less obvious in the language he employs because
he drops the language of consciousness and acts.) Of particular importance, Sartre
thought, was Husserl's notion of intentionality. In Sartre's interpretation of this idea,
consciousness is not to be identified with a thing (for example a mind, soul or brain),
that is to say some kind of a repository of ideas and images of things. Rather,
consciousness is nothing but a directedness towards things. Sartre found a nice way to
sum up the notion of the intentional object: If I love her, I love her because she is lovable
(Sartre 1970:4-5). Within my experience, her lovableness is not an aspect of my image
of her, rather it is a feature of her (and ultimately a part of the world) towards which my
consciousness directs itself. The things I notice about her (her smile, her laugh) are not
originally neutral, and then I interpret the idea of them as 'lovely', they are aspects of
her as lovable. The notion that consciousness is not a thing is vital to Sartre. Indeed,
consciousness is primarily to be characterised as nothing: it is first and
foremost not that which it is conscious of. (Sartre calls human existence the 'for-itself',
and the being of things the 'in-itself'.) Because it is not a thing, it is not subject to the
laws of things; specifically, it is not part of a chain of causes and its identity is not akin to
that of a substance. Above we suggested that a concern with the nature of existence, and
more particularly a concern with the distinctive nature of human existence, are defining
existentialist themes.
Moreover, qua consciousness, and not a thing that is part of the causal chain, I am free.
From moment to moment, my every action is mine alone to choose. I will of course have
a past 'me' that cannot be dispensed with; this is part of my 'situation'. However, again, I
am first and foremost notmy situation. Thus, at every moment I choose whether to
continue on that life path, or to be something else. Thus, my existence (the mere fact
that I am) is prior to my essence (what I make of myself through my free choices). I am
thus utterly responsible for myself. If my act is not simply whatever happens to come to
mind, then my action may embody a more general principle of action. This principle too
is one that I must have freely chosen and committed myself to. It is an image of the type
of life that I believe has value. (In these ways, Sartre intersects with the broadly Kantian
account of freedom which we introduced above in our thematic section.) As situated, I
also find myself surrounded by such images from religion, culture, politics or morality
but none compels my freedom. (All these forces that seek to appropriate my freedom
by objectifying me form Sartre's version of the crowd theme.) I exist as freedom,

primarily characterised as notdetermined, so my continuing existence requires the ever

renewed exercise of freedom (thus, in our thematic discussion above, the notion from
Spinoza and Leibniz of existence as a striving-to-exist). Thus also, my non-existence,
and the non-existence of everything I believe in, is only a free choice away. I (in the
sense of an authentic human existence) am not what I 'am' (the past I have accumulated,
the things that surround me, or the way that others view me). I am alone in my
responsibility; my existence, relative to everything external that might give it meaning,
is absurd. Face to face with such responsibility, I feel 'anxiety'. Notice that although
Sartre's account of situatedness owes much to Nietzsche and Heidegger, he sees it
primarily in terms of what gives human freedom its meaning and its burden. Nietzsche
and Heidegger, in contrast, view such a conception of freedom as naively metaphysical.
Suppose, however, that at some point I am conscious of myself in a thing-like way. For
example, I say 'I am a student' (treating myself as having a fixed, thing-like identity) or 'I
had no choice' (treating myself as belonging to the causal chain). I am ascribing a fixed
identity or set of qualities to myself, much as I would say 'that is a piece of granite'. In
that case I am existing in denial of my distinctively human mode of existence; I am
fleeing from my freedom. This is inauthenticity or 'bad faith'. As we shall see,
inauthenticity is not just an occasional pitfall of human life, but essential to it. Human
existence is a constant falling away from an authentic recognition of its freedom. Sartre
here thus echoes the notion in Heidegger than inauthenticity is a condition of possibility
of human existence.
Intentionality manifests itself in another important way. Rarely if ever am I simply
observing the world; instead I am involved in wanting to do something, I have a goal or
purpose. Here, intentional consciousness is not a static directedness towards things,
but is rather an activeprojection towards the future. Suppose that I undertake as my
project marrying my beloved. This is an intentional relation to a future state of affairs.
As free, I commit myself to this project and must reaffirm that commitment at every
moment. It is part of my life project, the image of human life that I offer to myself and to
others as something of value. Notice, however, that my project involves inauthenticity. I
project myself into the future where I will be married to her that is, I define myself as
'married', as if I were a fixed being. Thus there is an essential tension to all projection.
On the one hand, the mere fact that I project myself into the future is emblematic of my
freedom; only a radically free consciousness can project itself. I exist as projecting
towards the future which, again, I am not. Thus, I am (in the sense of an authentic self)

what I am not (because my projecting is always underway towards the future). On the
other hand, in projecting I am projecting myself assomething, that is, as a thing that no
longer projects, has no future, is not free. Every action, then, is both an expression of
freedom and also a snare of freedom. Projection is absurd: I seek to become the
impossible object, for-itself-in-itself, a thing that is both free and a mere thing. Born of
this tension is a recognition of freedom, what it entails, and its essential fragility. Thus,
once again, we encounter existential anxiety. (In this article, we have not stressed the
importance of the concept of time for existentialism, but it should not be overlooked:
witness one of Nietzsche's most famous concepts (eternal recurrence) and the title of
Heidegger's major early work (Being and Time).)
In my intentional directedness towards my beloved I find her 'loveable'. This too,
though, is an objectification. Within my intentional gaze, she is loveable in much the
same way that granite is hard or heavy. Insofar as I am in love, then, I seek to deny her
freedom. Insofar, however, as I wish to be loved by her, then she must be free to choose
me as her beloved. If she is free, she escapes my love; if not, she cannot love. It is in
these terms that Sartre analyses love in Part Three of Being and Nothingness. Love
here is a case study in the basic forms of social relation. Sartre is thus moving from an
entirely individualistic frame of reference (my self, my freedom and my projects)
towards a consideration of the self in concrete relations with others. Sartre is working
through in a way he would shortly see as being inadequate the issues presented by
the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, which we mentioned above. This 'hell' of endlessly
circling acts of freedom and objectification is brilliantly dramatised in Sartre's play No
Exit.
A few years later at the end of the 1940s, Sartre wrote what has been published
as Notebooks for an Ethics. Sartre (influenced in the meantime by the criticisms of
Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir, and by his increasing commitment to collectivist
politics) elaborated greatly his existentialist account of relations with others, taking the
Hegelian idea more seriously. He no longer thinks of concrete relations so
pessimistically. While Nietzsche and Heidegger both suggest the possibility of an
authentic being with others, both leave it seriously under-developed. For our purposes,
there are two key ideas in the Notebooks. The first is that my projects can be realised
only with the cooperation of others; however, that cooperation presupposes their
freedom (I cannot make her love me), and their judgements about me must concern
me. Therefore permitting and nurturing the freedom of others must be a central part of

all my projects. Sartre thus commits himself against any political, social or economic
forms of subjugation. Second, there is the possibility of a form of social organisation and
action in which each individual freely gives him or herself over to a joint project: a 'city
of ends' (this is a reworking of Kant's idea of the 'kingdom of ends', found in
theGrounding for the Metaphysics of Morals). An authentic existence, for Sartre,
therefore means two things. First, it is something like a 'style' of existing one that at
every moment is anxious, and that means fully aware of the absurdity and fragility of its
freedom. Second, though, there is some minimal level of content to any authentic
project: whatever else my project is, it must also be a project of freedom, for myself
and for others.

e. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) as an Existentialist

Philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir was the youngest student ever to pass the
demanding agrgation at the prestigious cole Normale Suprieure. Subsequently a
star Normalienne, she was a writer, philosopher, feminist, lifelong partner of JeanPaul Sartre, notorious for her anti-bourgeois way of living and her free sexual
relationships which included among others a passionate affair with the American writer
Nelson Algren. Much ink has been spilled debating whether de Beauvoirs work
constitutes a body of independent philosophical work, or is a reformulation of Sartres
work. The debate rests of course upon the fundamental misconception that wants a body
of work to exist and develop independently of (or uninfluenced by) its intellectual
environment. Such objectivity is not only impossible but also undesirable: such a body
of work would be ultimately irrelevant since it would be non-communicable. So the
question of de Beauvoirs independence could be dismissed here as irrelevant to the
philosophical questions that her work raises.
In 1943 Being and Nothingness, the groundwork of the Existentialist movement in
France was published. There Sartre gave an account of freedom as ontological
constitutive of the subject. Onecannot but be free: this is the kernel of the Sartrean
conception of freedom. In 1945 Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception is
published. There, as well as in an essay from the same year titled 'The war has taken
place', Merleau-Ponty heavily criticizes the Sartrean stand, criticising it as a
reformulation of basic Stoic tenets. One cannot assume freedom in isolation from the
freedom of others. Action is participatory: my freedom is interwoven with that of

others by way of the world (Merleau-Ponty in Stewart 1995:315). Moreover action

takes place within a certain historical context. For Merleau-Ponty the subjective freewill is always in a dialectical relationship with its historical context. In 1947 Simone de
Beauvoirs Ethics of Ambiguity is published. The book is an introduction to
existentialism but also a subtle critique of Sartres position on freedom, and a partial
extension of existentialism towards the social. Although de Beauvoir will echo MerleauPontys criticism regarding the essential interrelation of the subjects, nevertheless she
will leave unstressed the importance that the social context plays in the explication of
moral problems. Like Sartre it is only later in her life that this will be acknowledged. In
any case, de Beauvoirs book precipitates in turn a major rethink on Sartres part, and
the result is theNotebooks for an Ethics.
In Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir offers a picture of the human subject as constantly
oscillating between facticity and transcendence. Whereas the human is always already
restricted by the brute facts of his existence, nevertheless it always aspires to overcome
its situation, to choose its freedom and thus to create itself. This tension must be
considered positive, and not restrictive of action. It is exactly because the ontology of the
human is a battleground of antithetical movements (a view consistent with de
Beauvoirs Hegelianism) that the subject must produce an ethics which will be
continuous with its ontological core. The term for this tension is ambiguity. Ambiguity
is not a quality of the human as substance, but a characterisation of human existence.
We are ambiguous beings destined to throw ourselves into the future while
simultaneously it is our very own existence that throws us back into facticity. That is to
say, back to the brute fact that we are in a sense always already destined to fail not in
this or that particular project but to fail as pure and sustained transcendence. It is
exactly because of (and through) this fundamental failure that we realize that our
ethical relation to the world cannot be self-referential but must pass through the
realization of the common destiny of the human as a failed and interrelated being.
De Beauvoir, unlike Sartre, was a scholarly reader of Hegel. Her position on an
existential ethics is thus more heavily influenced by Hegels view in
the Phenomenology of Spirit concerning the moment of recognition (Hegel 1977:111).
There Hegel describes the movement in which self-consciousness produces itself by
positing another would be self-consciousness, not as a mute object (Gegen-stand) but
as itself self-consciousness. The Hegelian movement remains one of the most
fascinating moments in the history of philosophy since it is for the first time that the

constitution of the self does not take place from within the self (as happens with
Descartes, for whom the only truth is the truth of my existence; or Leibniz, for whom
the monads are windowless; or Fichte, for whom the I is absolutely self-constitutive)
but from the outside. It is, Hegel tells us, only because someone else recognizes me as a
subject that I can be constituted as such. Outside the moment of recognition there is no
self-consciousness. De Beauvoir takes to heart the Hegelian lesson and tries to
formulate an ethics from it.
What would this ethics be? As in Nietzsche, ethics refers to a way of life (a ), as
opposed to morality which concerns approved or condemned behaviour. Thus there are
no recipes for ethics. Drawn from Hegels moment of recognition, de Beauvoir
acknowledges that the possibility of human flourishing is based firstly upon the
recognition of the existence of the other (Man can find a justification of his own
existence only in the existence of the other men (Beauvoir 1976:72) and secondly on the
recognition that my own flourishing (or my ability to pose projects, in the language of
existentialists) passes through the possibility of a common flourishing. Only the
freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity,
(Beauvoir 1976:71) de Beauvoir writes; or again To will oneself free is also to will others
free (Beauvoir 1976:73). TheEthics of Ambiguity ends by declaring the necessity of
assuming ones freedom and the assertion that it is only through action that freedom
makes itself possible. This is not a point to be taken light-heartedly. It constitutes a
movement of opposition against a long tradition of philosophy understanding itself
as theoria: the disinterested contemplation on the nature of the human and the world.
De Beauvoir, in common with most existentialists, understands philosophy as praxis:
involved action in the world and participation in the course of history. It is out of this
understanding that The Second Sex is born.
In 1949 Le Deuxime Sexe is published in France. In English in 1953 it appeared
as The Second Sexin an abridged translation. The book immediately became a best
seller and later a founding text ofSecond Wave Feminism (the feminist movement from
the early 60s to the 70s inspired by the civil rights movement and focusing at the
theoretical examination of the concepts of equality, inequality, the role of family, justice
and so forth). More than anything, The Second Sex constitutes a study in applied
existentialism where the abstract concept Woman gives way to the examination of the
lives of everyday persons struggling against oppression and humiliation. When de
Beauvoir says that there is no such thing as a Woman we have to hear the echo of the

Kierkegaardian assertion of the single individual against the abstractions of Hegelian

philosophy, or similarly Sartres insistence on the necessity of the prioritization of the
personal lives of self-creating people (what Sartre calls existence) as opposed to a preestablished ideal of what humans should be like (what Sartre calls essence). The
Second Sex is an exemplary text showing how a philosophical movement can have
real, tangible effects on the lives of many people, and is a magnificent exercise in what
philosophy could be.
I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating,
especially for women... (Beauvoir 2009:3). The Second Sex begins with the most
obvious (but rarely posed) question: What is woman? De Beauvoir finds that at present
there is no answer to that question. The reason is that tradition has always thought of
woman as the other of man. It is only man that constitutes himself as a subject (as
the Absolute de Beauvoir says), and woman defines herself only through him. She
determines and differentiates herself in relation to man, and he does not in relation to
her; she is the inessential in front of the essential... (Beauvoir 2009:6). But why is it
that woman has initially accepted or tolerated this process whereby she becomes
the other of man? De Beauvoir does not give a consoling answer; on the contrary, by
turning to Sartres notion of bad faith (which refers to the human beings anxiety in
front of the responsibility entailed by the realization of its radical freedom) she thinks
that women at times are complicit to their situation. It is indeed easier for one
anyone to assume the role of an object (for example a housewife 'kept' by her
husband) than to take responsibility for creating him or herself and creating the
possibilities of freedom for others. Naturally the condition of bad faith is not always the
case. Often women found themselves in a sociocultural environment which denied them
the very possibility of personal flourishing (as happens with most of the major religious
communities). A further problem that women face is that of understanding themselves
as a unity which would enable them to assume the role of their choosing. Proletarians
say we. So do blacks (Beauvoir 2009:8). By saying we they assume the role of the
subject and turn everyone else into other. Women are unable to utter this we. They
live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests and social
conditions to certain men fathers or husbands more closely than to other women. As
bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women
proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black
women (Beauvoir 2009:9). Women primarily align themselves to their class or race

and not to other women. The female identity is very much bound up with the identity of
the men around them... (Reynolds 2006:145).
One of the most celebrated moments in The Second Sex is the much quoted phrase:
One is not born, but rather becomes, woman (Beauvoir 2009:293). She explains: No
biological, physical or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes
on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product
between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine (Beauvoir 2009:293). For
some feminists this clearly inaugurates the problematic of the sex-gender distinction
(where sex denotes the biological identity of the person and gender the cultural
attribution of properties to the sexed body). Simply put, there is absolutely nothing that
determines the assumed femininity of the woman (how a woman acts, feels, behaves)
everything that we have come to think as feminine is a social construction not a natural
given. Later feminists like Monique Wittig and Judith Butler will argue that sex is
already gender in the sense that a sexed body exists always already within a cultural
nexus that defines it. Thus the sex assignment (a doctor pronouncing the sex of the
baby) is a naturalized (but not at all natural) normative claim which delivers the
human into a world of power relations.

f. Albert Camus (1913-1960) as an Existentialist Philosopher

Albert Camus was a French intellectual, writer and journalist. His multifaceted work
as well as his ambivalent relation to both philosophy and existentialism makes every
attempt to classify him a rather risky operation. A recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize for
Literature primarily for his novels, he is also known as a philosopher due to his nonliterary work and his relation with Jean-Paul Sartre. And yet his response was clear: I
am not a philosopher, because I dont believe in reason enough to believe in a system.
What interests me is knowing how we must behave, and more precisely, how to behave
when one does not believe in God or reason (Camus in Sherman 2009: 1). The issue is
not just about the label 'existentialist'. It rather points to a deep tension within the
current of thought of all thinkers associated with existentialism. The question is: With
how many voices canthought speak? As we have already seen, the thinkers of
existentialism often deployed more than one. Almost all of them share a deep suspicion
to a philosophy operating within reason as conceived of by the Enlightenment. Camus
shares this suspicion and his so called philosophy of the absurd intends to set limits to
the overambitions of Western rationality. Reason is absurd in that it believes that it can

explain the totality of the human experience whereas it is exactly its inability for
explanation that, for example, a moment of fall designates. Thus in his novel The
Fall the protagonists tumultuous narrative reveals the overtaking of a life of superficial
regularity by the forces of darkness and irrationality. A bourgeois hell, inhabited of
course by bad dreams (Camus 2006:10). In a similar fashion Camus has also
repudiated his connection with existentialism. Non, je ne suis pas existentialist is
the title of a famous interview that he gave for the magazine Les Nouvelles
Littraires on the 15 of November, 1945. The truth of the matter is that Camus
rejection of existentialism is directed more toward Sartres version of it rather than
toward a dismissal of the main problems that the existential thinkers faced. Particularly,
Camus was worried that Sartres deification of history (Sartres proclaimed Marxism)
would be incompatible with the affirmation of personal freedom. Camus accuses Hegel
(subsequently Marx himself) of reducing man to history and thus denying man the
possibility of creating his own history, that is, affirming his freedom.
Philosophically, Camus is known for his conception of the absurd. Perhaps we should
clarify from the very beginning what the absurd is not. The absurd is not nihilism. For
Camus the acceptance of the absurd does not lead to nihilism (according to Nietzsche
nihilism denotes the state in which the highest values devalue themselves) or to inertia,
but rather to their opposite: to action and participation. The notion of the absurd
signifies the space which opens up between, on the one hand, mans need for
intelligibility and, on the other hand, 'the unreasonable silence of the world' as he
beautifully puts it. In a world devoid of God, eternal truths or any other guiding
principle, how could man bear the responsibility of a meaning-giving activity? The
absurd man, like an astronaut looking at the earth from above, wonders whether a
philosophical system, a religion or a political ideology is able to make the
world respond to the questioning of man, or rather whether all human constructions
are nothing but the excessive face-paint of a clown which is there to cover his sadness.
This terrible suspicion haunts the absurd man. In one of the most memorable openings
of a non-fictional book he states: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem
and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering
the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest whether or not the world has
three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories comes afterwards.
These are games; one must first answer (Camus 2000:11). The problem of suicide (a
deeply personal problem) manifests the exigency of a meaning-giving response. Indeed
for Camus a suicidal response to the problem of meaning would be the confirmation that

the absurd has taken over mans inner life. It would mean that man is not any more an
animal going after answers, in accordance with some inner drive that leads him to act in
order to endow the world with meaning. The suicide has become but a passive recipient
of the muteness of the world. ...The absurd ... is simultaneously awareness and
rejection of death (Camus 2000:54). One has to be aware of death because it is
precisely the realization of mans mortality that pushes someone to strive for answers
and one has ultimately to reject death that is, reject suicide as well as the living death
of inertia and inaction. At the end one has to keep the absurd alive, as Camus says. But
what does it that mean?
In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus tells the story of the mythical Sisyphus who was
condemned by the Gods to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain and then have
to let it fall back again of its own weight. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless
and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of
during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time
crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn (Camus
2000:109). One must imagine then Sisyphus victorious: fate and absurdity have been
overcome by a joyful contempt. Scorn is the appropriate response in the face of the
absurd; another name for this 'scorn' though would be artistic creation. When Camus
says: One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of
happiness (Camus 2000:110) he writes about a moment of exhilarated madness, which
is the moment of the genesis of the artistic work. Madness, but nevertheless profound
think of the function of the Fool in Shakespeares King Lear as the one who reveals to
the king the most profound truths through play, mimicry and songs. Such madness can
overcome the absurd without cancelling it altogether.
Almost ten years after the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus Camus publishes his
second major philosophical work, The Rebel (1951). Camus continues the problematic
which had begun with The Myth of Sisyphus. Previously, revolt or creation had been
considered the necessary response to the absurdity of existence. Here, Camus goes on to
examine the nature of rebellion and its multiple manifestations in history. In The Myth
of Sisyphus, in truly Nietzschean fashion, Camus had said: There is but one useful
action, that of remaking man and the earth (Camus 2000:31). However, in The Rebel,
reminiscent of Orwells Animal Farm, one of the first points he makes is the following:
The slave starts by begging for justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He too
wants to dominate (Camus 2000b:31). The problem is that while man genuinely rebels

against both unfair social conditions and, as Camus says, against the whole of creation,
nevertheless in the practical administration of such revolution, man comes to deny the
humanity of the other in an attempt to impose his own individuality. Take for example
the case of the infamous Marquis de Sade which Camus explores. In Sade, contradictory
forces are at work (see The 120 Days of Sodom). On the one hand, Sade wishes the
establishment of a (certainly mad) community with desire as the ultimate master, and
on the other hand this very desire consumes itself and all the subjects who stand in its
way.
Camus goes on to examine historical manifestations of rebellion, the most prominent
case being that of the French Revolution. Camus argues that the revolution ended up
taking the place of the transcendent values which it sought to abolish. An all-powerful
notion of justice now takes the place formerly inhabited by God. Rousseaus infamous
suggestion that under the rule of general will everyone would be 'forced to be free'
(Rousseau in Foley 2008:61) opens the way to the crimes committed after the
revolution. Camus fears that all revolutions end with the re-establishment of the State.
...Seventeen eighty-nine brings Napoleon; 1848 Napoleon III; 1917 Stalin; the Italian
disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler (Camus
2000b:146). Camus is led to examine the Marxist view of history as a possible response
to the failed attempts at the establishment of a true revolutionary regime. Camus
examines the similarities between the Christian and the Marxist conception of history.
They both exhibit a bourgeois preoccupation with progress. In the name of the future
everything can be justified: the future is the only kind of property that the masters
willingly concede to the slaves (Camus 2000b:162). History according to both views is
the linear progress from a set beginning to a definite end (the metaphysical salvation of
man or the materialistic salvation of him in the future Communist society). Influenced
by Kojves reading of Hegel, Camus interprets this future, classless society as the end
of history. The end of history suggests that when all contradictions cease then history
itself will come to an end. This is, Camus argues, essentially nihilistic: history, in effect,
accepts that meaning creation is no longer possible and commits suicide. Because
historical revolutions are for the most part nihilistic movements, Camus suggests that it
is the making-absolute of the values of the revolution that necessarily lead to their
negation. On the contrary a relative conception of these values will be able to sustain a
community of free individuals who have not forgotten that every historical rebellion has
begun by affirming a proto-value (that of human solidarity) upon which every other
value can be based.

3. The Influence of Existentialism

a. The Arts and Psychology

In the field of visual arts existentialism exercised an enormous influence, most obviously
on the movement of Expressionism. Expressionism began in Germany at the
beginning of the 20thcentury. With its emphasis on subjective experience, Angst and
intense emotionality, German expressionism sought to go beyond the naivet of realist
representation and to deal with the anguish of the modern man (exemplified in the
terrible experiences of WWI). Many of the artists of Expressionism read Nietzsche
intensively and following Nietzsches suggestion for a transvaluation of values
experimented with alternative lifestyles. Erich Heckels woodcut Friedrich Nietzsche
from 1905 is a powerful reminder of the movements connection to Existentialist
thought. Abstract expressionism (which included artists such as de Kooning and
Pollock, and theorists such as Rosenberg) continued with some of the same themes in
the United States from the 1940s and tended to embrace existentialism as one of its
intellectual guides, especially after Sartre's US lecture tour in 1946 and a production
of No Exit in New York.
German Expressionism was particularly important during the birth of the new art of
cinema. Perhaps the closest cinematic work to Existentialist concerns remains F.W.
Murnaus The Last Laugh (1924) in which the constantly moving camera (which
prefigures the rule of the hand-held camera of the Danish Dogma 95) attempts to
arrest the spiritual anguish of a man who suddenly finds himself in a meaningless world.
Expressionism became a world-wide style within cinema, especially as film directors like
Lang fled Germany and ended up in Hollywood. Jean Genet's Un chant
d'amour (1950) is a moving poetic exploration of desire. In the sordid, claustrophobic
cells of a prison the inmates craving for intimacy takes place against the background of
an unavoidable despair for existence itself. European directors such as Bergman and
Godard are often associated with existentialist themes. Godard's Vivre sa vie (My Life
to Live, 1962) is explicit in its exploration of the nature of freedom under conditions of
extreme social and personal pressure. In the late 20 thand early 21st centuries
existentialist ideas became common in mainstream cinema, pervading the work of
writers and directors such as Woody Allen, Richard Linklater, Charlie Kaufman and
Christopher Nolan.

Given that Sartre and Camus were both prominent novelists and playwrights, the
influence of existentialism on literature is not surprising. However, the influence was
also the other way. Novelists such as Dostoevsky or Kafka, and the dramatist Ibsen, were
often cited by mid-century existentialists as important precedents, right along with
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Dostoevsky creates a character Ivan Karamazov (in The
Brothers Karamazov, 1880) who holds the view that if God is dead, then everything is
permitted; both Nietzsche and Sartre discuss Dostoevsky with enthusiasm. Within
drama, the theatre of the absurd and most obviously Beckett were influenced by
existentialist ideas; later playwrights such as Albee, Pinter and Stoppard continue this
tradition.
One of the key figures of 20 th century psychology, Sigmund Freud, was indebted to
Nietzsche especially for his analysis of the role of psychology within culture and history,
and for his view of cultural artefacts such as drama or music as 'unconscious'
documentations of psychological tensions. But a more explicit taking up of existentialist
themes is found in the broad 'existentialist psychotherapy' movement. A common theme
within this otherwise very diverse group is that previous psychology misunderstood the
fundamental nature of the human and especially its relation to others and to acts of
meaning-giving; thus also, previous psychology had misunderstood what a 'healthy'
attitude to self, others and meaning might be. Key figures here include Swiss
psychologists Ludwig Binswanger and later Menard Boss, both of who were enthusiastic
readers of Heidegger; the Austrian Frankl, who invented the method of logotherapy; in
England, Laing and Cooper, who were explicitly influenced by Sartre; and in the United
States, Rollo May, who stresses the ineradicable importance of anxiety.

b. Philosophy
As a whole, existentialism has had relatively little direct influence within philosophy. In
Germany, existentialism (and especially Heidegger) was criticised for being obscure,
abstract or even mystical in nature. This criticism was made especially by Adorno
in The Jargon of Authenticity, and in Dog Years, novelist Gunter Grass gives a
Voltaire-like, savage satire of Heidegger. The criticism was echoed by many in the
analytic tradition. Heidegger and the existentialist were also taken to task for paying
insufficient attention to social and political structures or values, with dangerous results.
In France, philosophers like Sartre were criticised by those newly under the influence of
structuralism for paying insufficient attention to the nature of language and to

impersonal structures of meaning. In short, philosophy moved on, and in different

directions. Individual philosophers remain influential, however: Nietzsche and
Heidegger in particular are very much 'live' topics in philosophy, even in the 21 st century.
However, there are some less direct influences that remain important. Let us raise three
examples. Both the issue of freedom in relation to situation, and that of the
philosophical significance of what otherwise might appear to be extraneous contextual
factors, remain key, albeit in dramatically altered formulation, within the work
of Michel Foucault or Alain Badiou, two figures central to late 20 th century European
thought. Likewise, the philosophical importance that the existentialists placed upon
emotion has been influential, legitimising a whole domain of philosophical research
even by philosophers who have no interest in existentialism. Similarly, existentialism
was a philosophy that insisted philosophy could and should deal very directly with 'real
world' topics such as sex, death or crime, topics that had most frequently been
approached abstractly within the philosophical tradition. Mary Warnock wrote on
existentialism and especially Sartre, for example, while also having an incredibly
important and public role within recent applied ethics.