What does existentialism

Freedom and Value Existentialism did not develop much in the way of a normative ethics; however, a certain approach to the theory of value and to moral psychology, deriving from the idea of existence as self-making in situation, is a distinctive mark of the existentialist tradition.

Politics, History, Engagement For the existentialists, engagement is the source of meaning and value; in choosing myself I in a certain sense make my world. Existentialism Today As a cultural movement, existentialism belongs to the past. Bibliography The bibliography is divided into two sections; taken together, they provide a representative sample of existentialist writing.

Works Cited Aho, K. Apel, K. Arendt, H. Arp, K. Bakewell, S. Baring, E. Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex , H. Parshley trans. Bergoffen, D. Bernasconi, R. Butler, J. Carr, D. Cooper, D. Existentialism , Oxford: Blackwell. Crowell, S.

Deutscher, P. Dreyfus, H. Haugeland, Fackenheim, E. Fell, J. Gabriel, M. Gordon, L. Gelven, M. Guignon, C. Hannay, A. Kierkegaard , London: Routledge. Hatab, L. Haugeland, J. Heidegger, M. Jaspers, K. Joseph, F. Woodward eds. Judaken, J. Bernasconi eds. Kaufmann, W. Khawaja, N. Kierkegaard, S. Concluding Unscientific Postscript , David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie trans. Fear and Trembling , Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong trans. Kruks, S. Korsgaard, C. MacIntyre, A. Malpas, J. Marcel, G.

McMullin, I. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception , Colin Smith trans. Moran, R. Natanson, M. Nehamas, A. Nietzsche, F. On the Genealogy of Morals , Walter Kaufmann trans. The Gay Science , Walter Kaufmann trans. Ratcliffe, M. Reynolds, J. Understanding Existentialism , Stocksfield: Acumen. Ricoeur, P.

Oneself as Another , Kathleen Blamey trans. Sartre, J. Being and Nothingness , Hazel Barnes trans. Baudelaire , Martin Turnell trans. Search for a Method , Hazel Barnes trans. Existentialism is a Humanism , Carol Macomber trans. Nausea , Lloyd Alexander trans. What is Literature? Schacht, R. Schrift, A. Simons, M.

Spiegelberg, H. Taylor, C. Warnock, M. Webber, J. Westphal, M. Zaner, R. Ihde eds. Aron, R. Barnes, H. Barrett, W. Buber, M. I and Thou , Walter Kaufmann trans.

New York: Scribner, Bultmann, R. Faith and Understanding , Louise Pettibone Smith trans. Busch, T. Camus, A.

The Stranger , Matthew Ward trans. Collins, J. Cotkin, G. Dostoevsky, F. Matlaw , New York: Norton. Earnshaw, S. Flynn, T. Gordon, H. Gordon, P. Grene, M. Reason and Existenz , William Earle trans. Judt, T. Kant, I. Greene and Hoyt H.

Hudson trans. Being and Having , Katherine Farrer trans. McBride, W. Publishers Merleau-Ponty, M. Adventures of the Dialectic , Joseph Bien trans. The Phenomenology of Perception , Colin Smith trans. Olafson, F. Ortega y Gasset, J. Revolt of the Masses , Anthony Kerrigan trans. Poster, M. Shestov, L. Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy , Elinor Hewitt trans. Solomon, R. A movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy , with some forerunners in earlier centuries.

Existentialism stresses that people are entirely free and therefore responsible for what they make of themselves. With this responsibility comes a profound anguish or dread.

New Word List Word List. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? The answer is naturally affirmative. Abraham should refuse God, and he should respect the ethical law. 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 Christian God then, the author of the moral law at his will suspends the law and demands his unlawful wish be obeyed. Jacques Derrida notes that the temptation is now for Abraham the ethical law itself Derrida : 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 also differentiates between the act of Abraham and the act of a tragic hero like Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia. 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.

Remarkably, what in sounded like megalomania came some years later to be realized. 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. 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.

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.

For Nietzsche the crisis of meaning is inextricably linked to the crisis of religious consciousness in the West. 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. But one has to be careful here. 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? The above sentences are very far from constituting a cheerful declaration: no one is happy here!

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. 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. 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.

Philosophical speculation is the result of a certain way of life and the attempted justification of this life. The point is not always to speculate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

He remains notorious for his involvement with National Socialism in the s. Outside European philosophy, Heidegger is only occasionally taken seriously, and is sometimes actually ridiculed famously the Oxford philosopher A.

In , 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. There he repudiates any possible connection of his philosophy with the existentialism of Sartre. The answer here is that Heidegger can be classified as an existentialist thinker despite all his differences from Sartre. 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 other than those of the natural sciences.

His magnum opus Being and Time is an investigation into the meaning of Being as that manifests itself through the human being, Dasein. 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 place where 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger also believes that anxiety is born out of the terror of nothingness. 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. 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.

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. 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.

From the s 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. 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 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 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. 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. However, again, I am first and foremost not my 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. I exist as freedom, primarily characterised as not determined, 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 am alone in my responsibility; my existence, relative to everything external that might give it meaning, is absurd. Nietzsche and Heidegger, in contrast, view such a conception of freedom as naively metaphysical.