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 don’t 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.
a.
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 non-professional, 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 19th 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 18th 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 19th 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 naïve 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 Hegel’s 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
the Nichomachean 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 is action. 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' (José 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 broadly aristocratic criterion for social and political
leadership.
2. Key Existentialist Philosophers
a. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) as an Existentialist Philosopher
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.
Kierkegaard’s 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 Abraham’s 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. Kierkegaard’s 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 arch-enemy 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 Begriff (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 one’s 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 this terra incognita of man’s
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 over-optimistic
(because modelled after the Natural sciences) model of philosophy which was taught
to talk 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 God’s 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, shouldn’t Abraham refuse to execute God’s vicious plan? Isn’t 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? Kierkegaard’s 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).
Abraham’s faith is proved by the strength of his love for his son. However, this doesn’t 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 hero’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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,
and individuality 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 individual’s 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 madman’s woeful
mourning which follows the announcement. “‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I‘ll 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! Nietzsche’s 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
“man’s 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 Übermensch (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 an agonistic 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 Nietzsche’s 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 of nutrition. 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 virtù 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 body’s 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
one’s 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. Morality’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 (1889-1976) as an Existentialist Philosopher
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 man’s
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. Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s own repudiation of existentialism,
still to characterise Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s 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 a hypokeimenon (Aristotle) –
what through the filtering of Greek thought by the Romans becomes substantia, 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-the-world.
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, Sartre’s 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 Heidegger’s ek-sistence 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
Dasein’s 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 de-associated 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 don’t 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 man’s 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
Dasein’s 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. Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s 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 novel Nausea) 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 active projection 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 as something,
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
the Grounding 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 agrégation at the
prestigious École Normale Supérieure. Subsequently a star Normalienne, she was a writer,
philosopher, feminist, lifelong partner of Jean-Paul 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 Beauvoir’s work constitutes a body of independent philosophical work, or is a
reformulation of Sartre’s 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 Beauvoir’s ‘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. One cannot but be free: this is the kernel of the Sartrean conception of freedom. In
1945 Merleau-Ponty’s 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 free-will is always in a dialectical relationship with its historical context.
In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity is published. The book is an introduction
to existentialism but also a subtle critique of Sartre’s position on freedom, and a partial
extension of existentialism towards the social. Although de Beauvoir will echo Merleau-
Ponty’s 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
Beauvoir’s book precipitates in turn a major rethink on Sartre’s part, and the result is
the Notebooks 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 Beauvoir’s 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 Hegel’s 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 βίος), as opposed
to morality which concerns approved or condemned behaviour. Thus there are no recipes
for ethics. Drawn from Hegel’s 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). The Ethics of Ambiguity ends by declaring the
necessity of assuming one’s 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 Deuxième 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 of Second Wave Feminism (the feminist movement from the early 60’s to the
70’s 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 Sartre’s insistence on the
necessity of the prioritization of the personal lives of self-creating people (what Sartre calls
‘existence’) as opposed to a pre-established 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 Sartre’s notion of bad faith (which refers to the human
being’s 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 non-literary work and
his relation with Jean-Paul Sartre. And yet his response was clear: “I am not a philosopher,
because I don’t 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 can thought 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 protagonist’s 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 Littéraires on the 15 of November, 1945. The truth of
the matter is that Camus’ rejection of existentialism is directed more toward Sartre’s version
of it rather than toward a dismissal of the main problems that the existential thinkers faced.
Particularly, Camus was worried that Sartre’s deification of history (Sartre’s 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, man’s 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 man’s
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 man’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 Orwell’s 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. Rousseau’s 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 Kojève’s
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 naiveté 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 Nietzsche’s
suggestion for a transvaluation of values experimented with alternative lifestyles. Erich
Heckel’s woodcut “Friedrich Nietzsche” from 1905 is a powerful reminder of the movement’s
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. Murnau’s 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 20thand 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 20th 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 21st 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 20th 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.