Existentialism

10 Key excerpts on "Existentialism"

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  Merleau-Ponty

  • Stephen Priest(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  III Existentialism Existentialism is the movement in nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy essentially characterised by attempts to solve fundamental problems about human existence. No set of problems or methods is common to all and only existentialists, but typically philosophers otherwise as diverse as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Jaspers and Marcel describe those features of the human condition which matter most to us as individuals and prescribe the exercise of human freedom as the means of authentically facing our situation. Their work is philosophically significant not only because they construe problems of death, anxiety, oneself and other people, sexuality and political and religious commitment as genuine, as not to be dismissed as unscientific, or to be dismissed on linguistic grounds alone. It has also been found to be significant by people thinking outside philosophy. This is perhaps a partial cause and partial consequence of several of the existentialists authoring plays, novels and political tracts and not confining their written output to the philosophical treatise. Some existentialists, notably Heidegger and Sartre, have denied that they are existentialists but this attempt to distance themselves from one another is rather unsuccessful. Although they do not form a tradition or school in an institutional sense their descriptions and prescriptions about what it is to be, to exist, form a common reaction against concerns with just what it is to be something, to have an essence. Understanding Existentialism is necessary for understanding Merleau-Ponty because his ‘existential phenomenology’ is a synthesis of Existentialism with Husserlian phenomenology. We have seen in the last chapter how Merleau-Ponty replaces the Husserlian concepts of the epoché, or phenomenological reduction, and the transcendental ego with the Heideggerian existential category being-in-the-world

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  Charles de Gaulle, the International System, and the Existential Difference

  • Graham O'Dwyer(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the absence of a definitive sense of Existentialism we are nonetheless able to distinguish some reoccurring and common themes that Existentialism is broadly concerned with. Given the emphasis on the subjective these quite naturally centre on questions that are concerned with the notion of finding, exploring, and defining individualistic meaning in life. Stephen Priest highlights this:

  Existentialism is the movement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy that addresses fundamental problems of human existence…there is no set of problems addressed by all and only those thinkers labelled ‘existentialist’. However, most of them are interested in some of: what is it to exist? Does existence have a purpose? Is there an objective difference between right and wrong? Are we free? Are we responsible for our actions? What is the right sort of religious, political or sexual commitment? How should we face death?13

  Here we are invited to recognize that Existentialism is an approach that takes the individual as the focal point of its inquiries into human existence rather than a broader investigation of the world. Yet before moving on to explore how Sartrean logic is echoed in de Gaulle’s rationale and the interconnectivity of this with his foreign policy, I firstly stress the point of individuality in a little more depth as this is a crucially important element of my overall argument.

  All existentialists must, by the logic of the field, stress the importance of individualism and hence a foundational consideration of Existentialism is for the individual to pull away from mass conformity or, to borrow a Nietzschean term, ‘the herd’. For example Thomas Flynn tells us that, ‘Existentialism is known as an “individualistic” philosophy…for the existentialist, being an individual in our mass society is an achievement rather than a starting point’.14 Stephen Earnshaw goes on to echo this statement, ‘Existentialism is a philosophy that takes as its starting point the individual’s existence…what sets it apart from most other philosophies is that it begins with the “individual” rather than the “universal” and so does not aim to arrive at general truths.’15

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  Rhetoric and Philosophy

  • Richard A. Cherwitz, Henry W. Johnstone Jr.(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is a picture of humankind’s “modern” predicament in the positivist age of the 20th century, an age when the “truth” of Christianity was losing ground to the “truth” of scientific and technological progress, and when it could be said in a spirit of “joyful wisdom” that “God is dead” and that “We have killed him” (Nietzsche, 1882/1971, pp. 167–168). Diagnosing the predicament’s twentieth century development, such acclaimed existentialist artists and philosophers as Kafka (e.g., 1925/1968), Sartre (e.g., 1938/1949), and Camus (e.g., 1942/1955) would further tell us how the human condition is one of “contingency,” “alienation,” “suffering,” “meaninglessness,” “anxiety,” and “guilt”; in short, humankind’s evolving modern predicament is a clear indication that existence, life itself, is “absurd.” Or, as Dostoevsky’s narrator would have it: “… one may say anything about the history of the world – anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say [,however,] is that it is rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat” (Dostoevsky, 1864/1960, p. 27). Rorty (1979) defines and defends “Existentialism” as “an intrinsically reactive movement of thought, one which has point only in opposition to the tradition” (p. 366). Indeed, much of what existentialists say about the question of existence is rooted in their reactive stance against the tradition of classical rationalism and its equating of man’s essence with his being an animal rationale – something living that has reason and that must overcome its emotional tendencies if it is to know and speak the truth. The above assessments of human existence certainly reflect this reaction, thereby adding grist to the mill for those who would interpret Existentialism as being but a philosophy advocating irrationalism

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  Sabert Basescu

  Selected Papers on Human Nature and Psychoanalysis

  • George Goldstein, Helen Golden, George Goldstein, Helen Golden(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Robert J.Katz

  Often just the mere thought of Existentialism brings to mind haunting images of an alienated figure such as Camus’ The Stranger, who, while dwelling in a state of despair, makes futile attempts to come to terms with the sense of insignificance, finiteness, and meaninglessness that seems to inhere in the tragic shadow cast over life by death.2 Throughout this struggle, there exists a profound sense of separateness and aloneness that pervades all aspects of his being. All of his existence is branded with an empty, hollow, depressive tone that silently screams out into a vacuous space in which meaningful relation is absent. It is the disconnection from both his self and others that most aptly colors this portrayal of the pathos of modern man.

  Although existential philosophy does maintain a profound understanding of and relationship to the basic conditions of life into which we are all born (or thrown), Existentialism actually has its origins in the struggle against the type of alienation and despair that Camus captured in such a masterly way. In fact, as will be seen momentarily, the Dutch philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), credited with being the founder of existential philosophy, was driven by the need to correct for the alienation, fragmentation, and lack of passionate relation that were beginning to characterize psychic life in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. By analyzing himself, Kierkegaard came to see that the deepest anxieties of his time were actually emanating from the alienation and fragmentation he was witnessing. As a result, he set out to combat the pathological conditions that were at the root of this societal problem.

  In the era in which Kierkegaard lived, a confluence of cultural forces was contributing to the fragmentation of psychic experience that became the focus of his concern. These deleterious factors had one effect in common: In one way or another, they all tended to treat man as an object. In philosophy, this phenomenon could be seen in Hegel’s elevation of abstract reasoning to the source of truth (“totalitarianism of reason”), thereby making rational thought the primary determinant of the relationship to reality (Husserl, 1965). In fact, Hegel’s emphasis on rational thinking spoke to the specific way in which Victorians were becoming overly reliant on a type of logical reasoning that compartmentalized their psychic experience. Here, the “child” within was separated from the overly rational “adult,” and emotions were being controlled by and subjugated to a conscious willing ruled by logic. All of this served to elevate rationality to new heights and had the effect of separating the Victorians from the richness and vitality that reside in the more irrational and subjective aspects of experience. Furthermore, the industrial revolution was proceeding at a rapid rate and was increasingly becoming one of the strongest social currents shaping psychosocial experience. As a result, Victorian man was being reduced to a means to an end, an insignificant cog on the wheel of the means of production—in short, just another object on the assembly line.

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  Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness

  • William L. McBride(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  are: we find ourselves in the midst of things, we are beings in the world. To understand the full nature and significance of this being in the world is a central task for existential philosophy. Its importance is apparent only when we realize that all subsequent analyses in Sartre stem from the analysis of the ground phenomenon of being in the world. For Sartre, then, existential philosophy is the analysis of being, and proceeds through the study of man’s being in the world. Such an analysis leads ultimately to the structures of the self, and the multiple aspects of the relationships between the self and other selves. The dialectic between self and other selves is the key to Sartre’s concept of human freedom.

  If Sartre’s search is then the search for being, a search that will lead in its final consequences to man’s freedom, we may now ask our second question: what has led Sartre to undertake this search? It is possible, of course, to answer this kind of question in a number of ways. We may try to develop a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sartre’s behavior—which, by the way, has been done;3 or, at the other extreme, we may attempt to analyze his problem purely on a philosophical plane. But more is involved: we are really faced with a basic problem, which is how to account for the multiple and divergent roots of existential philosophizing as they appear in the total cultural and historical heritage of man—for it should now be clear, even if it has not been explicitly stated, that Existentialism as the search for man’s being as such is an inseparable part of the organic nucleus of the human intellectual heritage.

  As a distinctive attitude and cultural phenomenon, as a central nerve trunk in the corpus of world literature, and, finally, as an historical development, the content of existential thought may be summarily indicated by listing four of its predominant characteristics. Existential thought is characterized, first, by a profound concern for the everlasting categories of man’s being, his fear, dread, suffering, aloneness, anguish, and death; second, by the fact that it takes man as the object of its inquiry, but man as an “unhappy consciousness,” as a fragmentary and fragmented creature who locates his existence in a cosmos that is at once overpowering, threatening, and demanding; third, by its internal un-neutrality toward God—the existentialist’s dialogue takes place in an empty cathedral, and the protagonists debate the terminology of the mass and, more important, for whom the mass is to be said; and fourth, by a decisive concern with man’s authenticity in existence, his gift of freedom which is his anguish, his total responsibility which is his dread.

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  Understanding Existentialism

  • Dr. Jack Reynolds(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  one Existentialism and its heritage

  Existentialism, perhaps to an extent unprecedented in the history of philosophy, has managed to capture the attention of the general public. Estimates of the number of people at Jean-Paul Sartre’s funeral in 1980 vary from 50,000 to 100,000, and this was well after his cultural and intellectual heyday. Simone de Beauvoir’s famous treatise on the situation of women, The Second Sex, has been one of the most widely read non-fiction books of the twentieth century. Existential plays and novels – in particular Sartre’s Nausea and Albert Camus’s The Outsider – have been read voraciously and critically acclaimed. Sartre and his more academically inclined colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty were the co-editors of the influential magazine Les Temps modernes, which considered all things philosophical, political and aesthetic, providing an intellectual point of reference for much of France. Without quite the same mainstream accessibility, or the literary bent (notwithstanding his preoccupation with poetry), Martin Heidegger has been enormously influential on generations of philosophers, as well as people working in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and his work has helped to spawn at least two very significant contemporary philosophical movements: hermeneutics and deconstruction.

  There are obviously many reasons for this primarily philosophical phenomenon capturing the attention of the public in the way that Existentialism did, not least the Second World War and the German occupation of France, which intensified existential concerns with freedom, responsibility and death. The literary manifestations of Existentialism also allowed a greater proportion of people to possess at least a tentative grasp of what it meant and certainly a greater grasp than might have been attained through the sometimes obscure philosophy of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir. These four philosophers will be the main focus of this book, and this means that chronologically we will be concerned with the post-Heideggerians, or what we might term the atheistic existentialists, although it will soon become clear that atheism is not a necessary component of existential thought. This book could alternatively be called “Understanding Existential Phenomenology” because all of these philosophers are significantly indebted to the phenomenological project, even if they also contest the “pure” phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. But without digressing unduly in justifications of the thinkers to be considered here, this book will focus on these roughly contemporaneous philosophers because of the conviction that it is the exchange of ideas between them that reveals Existentialism in both its most sophisticated and also its most diverse forms.

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  Existentialism and Social Work

  • Neil Thompson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Existentialism offers no simple answers to ethical questions and dilemmas but what it can provide is a framework which can help social workers to tackle such issues in a flexible way. A key ethical term is ‘authenticity’, the attempt to avoid self-delusion and accept responsibility for one’s own actions. In order to live a ‘moral life’, it is necessary to do justice to both forms of freedom. On the one hand we have authenticity and on the other we have ‘commitment’, an acceptance of the broader implications of social existence and a channelling of energies into extending the margin of political freedom. Existentialist ethics consists of efforts to move from ontological freedom to political freedom. Existentialist social theory can help to explain how and why this is possible. It is to this aspect of Existentialism that we now turn.

  Social theory Introduction

  One of the words people frequently associate with Existentialism is ‘individualism’. In some ways this association is a valid one. Sartre in particular, and the existentialists in general, emphasise the freedom and responsibility of the individual and, via phenomenology, his/her subjectivity. But, in other respects, Existentialism is not individualistic if, by this, we imply a neglect of the social and political dimension of human existence.

  In his early works Sartre was primarily concerned with the individual and what it means to exist in a godless world. Contrary to common criticism, he did not ignore social factors. In fact, his study of being-for-others examined the interaction of people on a micro-social level. It is clear therefore that Sartre’s writings formed a social philosophy right from the start. However, there is a gradual progression until, in the ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ the social factors, on both a micro- and macro-level, are to the fore. Many critics have argued that Sartre abandoned his earlier positions but a careful reading of his works reveals a consistency throughout. Barnes (1974, p. 14) and Craib (1976, Ch.5) explain this in more detail.

  In order to develop his views about the social field, Sartre relied heavily on concepts borrowed from marxism. He described Existentialism as an ‘enclave’ within marxism, a small but significant part of ‘historical materialism’ (see below). In Contat and Rybalka (1970) we find the opposite view, namely that Existentialism should be regarded as a philosophy which goes beyond marxism, rather than simply forming part of it. This is also my own view but, to a large extent, the debate is unimportant. The relative status of the two philosophies is not an issue for social work but the social theory which is born of the marriage between Existentialism and marxism certainly is.

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  Encyclopedia of Political Theory

  • Mark Bevir(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  While they have found existentialist themes evocative, critics often doubt their ethical, let alone their political import. Despite using normative terms that imply an ethical obligation to others, such as responsibility and commitment, it has not been easy to elicit intersubjectivity from philosophies of existence whose individuals seem to suffer a sense of traumatized isolation when they are not willfully independent. Existentialism’s subjects tend to be described in a rather solipsistic way, and when they do encounter others, their response is likely to be disappointment at being misunderstood by them or hostility to those who threaten their freedom. Sartre’s statement that “hell is other people” seems emblematic of a lack of empathy with others.

  Nevertheless, the ideas of the politically committed intellectual and of Existentialism as a concrete philosophy of liberation dedicated to transforming the way we live encouraged a group of French radicals to proclaim themselves existentialists in Nazi-occupied France. Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir composed the main core of the movement while others, like Camus, embraced some of its principal ideas but kept their distance. The movement’s members seized the rather inchoate themes of philosophies of existence and gave them a recognizable form they associated with leftist politics. This linkage was by no means inevitable: Nietzsche’s politics are more inclined to aristocratic elitism, while the Spanish existentialist Ortega y Gasset gives them a right-wing orientation. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty co-edited Les Temps Modernes, the main existentialist journal, until the mid-1950s, when political and philosophical differences resulted in a famous quarrel. Shortly thereafter, the rise of structuralist antihumanism resulted in the eclipse of Existentialism as a movement. Its Sartrean form, in particular, was now rejected as a philosophy of subjectivist humanism: a view that supplemented charges by communist critics, who disparaged his individualism. Sartre himself now declared Existentialism but an ideological moment of Marxism, while Merleau-Ponty pronounced the Movement dead and turned to exploration of an antihumanist ontology of existence more indebted to Heidegger than to Sartre.

  As a movement, Existentialism was associated with cultural innovation as well as philosophy. In her autobiography, de Beauvoir recalls with some bitterness that it was often their enemies who applied the existentialist label to their work, with the label soon extending to a certain style of painting, writing, and music whence it was exploited as a new vogue quickly seized upon by the media. By 1947, she laments, Existentialism was popularly associated with the brawls, festivities, and sexual licentiousness attributed to a café crowd that adopted an Italian penchant for dressing entirely in black as the marker of their unconventional mode of existence. De Beauvoir concedes, nonetheless, that Sartre was enthusiastic about the youth, jazz, and dance of this countercultural movement. Indeed, after the austerity of the war and the stifling conformity of French traditions, such modes of existence seemed to express something of the existentialist ideas that were transforming intellectual life. Did the new bohemians not exemplify, after all, the life of freedom that Sartre and de Beauvoir seemed to be advocating in their work and which their own lifestyle suggested? In place of the fidelities of bourgeois existence, with its monotonous productive toil, domestic labor, sexual inequality, monogamous family life, and Catholic piety, here was a child-free couple that ate in cafés, lived by writing, engaged in exotic sexual freedoms, traveled extensively, and proclaimed their atheism. Their example inspired many who would became part of the events of Paris 1968, while their rejection of bourgeois life complemented their socialist politics, their rejection of French colonialism, and their affinity with the artistic avant-garde.

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  The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science

  • Huon Wardle, Nigel Rapport, Albert Piette, Huon Wardle, Nigel Rapport, Albert Piette(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In philosophy, Existentialism has become one of the most influential perspectives of the twentieth century. There is today a certain renaissance of its classical works. These works are frequently and naively considered expressions of rebellion, radical subjectivism, and irrationalism that reject abstract scientific method, depersonalized formal logic, and social milieu as conditions of authentic existence. However, as a detailed retrospective analysis shows, such stereotypes appear as significant overstatements, since many existentialist ideas are not only relevant for the social sciences but also demonstrate explicit sociological content. Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Nicola Abbagnano are reasonably considered to be the predecessors or even the founders of existential sociology as an academic discipline. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre, who formulated the central maxima of Existentialism, existence precedes essence, developed an original theory of society and a typology of social groups (Craib, 1976 ; Hayim, 1980). Maurice Merleau-Ponty was characterized as an “existentialist of the social world” (Rabil 1967), and he published several works considering sociological issues (Merleau-Ponty 1951, 1988). Nicola Abbagnano made a significant contribution to the formation of sociological science in Italy, combining European theoretical traditions with the achievements of American empirical sociology

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  Science and the Structure of Ethics

  • Abraham Edel(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  50 Whatever our estimate of these pictures is to be, and whatever the outcome sought by their advocates, there can be little doubt that we have here, in the sense analyzed originally, an EP, but narrowed down to a particular view of the self in action—a striving of man beyond himself, a kind of self-extricating process.

  Now the study of the self and its features is in principle a scientific question. It is, of course, possible that there are limits to its scope, but these could be discovered only in its study, not as antecedent postulates. Thus, no matter what form the transcendence stage-settings for ethics may take, such questions as the cognitive beholding or the affective sensibility of man, or, in turn, the aloneness of the human spirit, its activity of rising above or its endlessly regressing movement, its creation of a psychic distance or gap from its object of beholding, and no doubt many more types of subtle phenomena are all serious materials for scientific scrutiny both as phenomena and as elements that enter into ethical processes.

  15. Evaluation of Existential Perspectives

  The purpose of a comparative study of EP’s is ultimately to stimulate the construction of a more adequate one for contemporary ethical theory. This involves evaluation, and so some marks of adequacy. Let us specify a set of terms for such a discussion. We shall call a feature that is appealed to in an evaluative inquiry a reference point . A class of reference points is a standpoint . So, for example, we can ask of an existential perspective whether it is clearly formulated and whether it is consistent; these are reference points, shaping up into or expressing a logical standpoint. A reference point becomes an evaluative criterion when it is assigned a positive or negative value in an evaluative reckoning; consistency almost always, and clarity usually, in a reflective enterprise has a positive value. A unified system of criteria we shall call a standard

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