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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
Have you ever wondered what the phrase "God is dead" means? You'll find out in Existentialism For Dummies, a handy guide to Nietzsche, Sartre, and Kierkegaard's favorite philosophy. See how existentialist ideas have influenced everything from film and literature to world events and discover whether or not existentialism is still relevant today. You'll find an introduction to existentialism and understand how it fits into the history of philosophy. This insightful guide will expose you to existentialism's ideas about the absurdity of life and the ways that existentialism guides politics, solidarity, and respect for others. There's even a section on religious existentialism. You'll be able to reviewkey existential themes and writings. Find out how to: * Trace the influence of existentialism * Distinguish each philosopher's specific ideas * Explain what it means to say that "God is dead" * See culture through an existentialist lens * Understand the existentialist notion of time, finitude, and death * Navigate the absurdity of life * Master the art of individuality Complete with lists of the ten greatest existential films, ten great existential aphorisms, and ten common misconceptions about existentialism, Existentialism For Dummies is your one-stop guide to a very influential school of thought.
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Existentialism For Dummies®
Table of Contents
Introduction
About This Book
Conventions Used in This Book
Foolish Assumptions
How This Book Is Organized
Part I: Introducing Existentialism
Part II: The Fundamental Problem: God Is Dead
Part III: Living a Meaningful Life in a Meaningless World
Part IV: The Enduring Impact of Existentialism
Part V: The Part of Tens
Icons Used in This Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I: Introducing Existentialism
Chapter 1: What Is Existentialism?
Existentialism Is a Philosophy
The Top Ten Existential Themes
Existentialism’s Place in the History of Philosophy
Chapter 2: The Big Names of Existentialism
Kierkegaard Makes Philosophy Personal
Nietzsche Declares that God Is Dead
Heidegger Systematizes Existentialism
The French Popularize a Growing Movement
Contemporary Existentialists Keep the Movement Going
Part II: The Fundamental Problem: God Is Dead
Chapter 3: If God Is Dead, Is Life Meaningless?
Who Died? What the Death of God Means
Just an observation, not a celebration
The death of absolute systems of thought
Killing the God Called Reason
What reason is all about
Where’s the human element?
Plato: The good stuff is elsewhere
Kant: The world isn’t knowable
The Death of God and Religion
How Christianity lost its mojo
Being religious isn’t a “Get out of jail free” card
Science Becomes Its Own Religion
The scientific worldview: Science as God
Science can’t replace God after all
So What Have You Lost If God Is Dead?
No easy answers: Rejecting all absolutes
The baby with the bathwater: Meaning, truth, and value
The danger of nihilism
Chapter 4: Anxiety, Dread, and Angst in an Empty World
Are Emotions Key to Understanding Life?
Emotions: Not traditionally valued by philosophers
Emotion: A source of insight in existentialism
Recognizing the Insights That Moods Provide
Your moods disclose how you exist
Moods are the flavors of life
You’re always tuned in to the world
Everyday moods and existential moods
Anxiety: The Existentialists’ Favorite Mood
Distinguishing anxiety from fear
Having anxiety means you’re an individual, like it or not
Sensing nothingness everywhere
Revealing the dizziness of freedom
A love-hate relationship with anxiety
Chapter 5: The Challenge of Absurdity and Authenticity
Absurdity 101
Defining absurdity
Everyday conceptions of absurdity
Understanding the Irrationality of the World
What makes up the world
Different ways of seeing order in the world
Like it or not, the world is entirely irrational
Viewing Irrationality from a Human Perspective
How you can come to see accidents everywhere
You’re addicted to imposing order on the world
The absurdity of imposing order on the disorderly
Authenticity 101: Striving to Be Genuine
The connection between authenticity and genuineness
Everybody digs authenticity
Matching just the right template
Understanding authenticity as representing
Authentic people: In the driver’s seat and in control
Taking Stock: Who Am I? How Can I Be Authentic?
Why existentialists reject worldly authenticity
Embracing existential authenticity: Seeing the kind of being that you are
The central truth about who you are: Humans are absurd beings
The many truths of your absurd nature
Authenticity 102: Living Inauthentically Means Running Away
Inauthentic people take the path of least resistance
Suicide is not the answer
Covering up the truth won’t save you
Embracing Absurdity: “The Myth of Sisyphus”
Sisyphus and his punishment
Rebel without a cause . . . but a smile
Part III: Living a Meaningful Life in a Meaningless World
Chapter 6: Understanding Our Unique Way of Existing in the World
Different Ways to Investigate Existence
Investigating the meaning of existence
Knowing existence means knowing you
Science: Analyzing life from the outside
Viewing life from the inside out
Living in Your Everyday World
The nuts and bolts of your life
Space, the final frontier of life
Meaning: Life’s requirement
Life’s a workshop, and you need tools
Doing without thinking: Look, no hands!
Coming to Grips with Who You Are
Sensing others all around you
You’re everyone and no one
Falling away . . . from yourself
Being authentic: Determining the shape of your life
Chapter 7: Not Tonight, Honey: Why We Need More Passion in Our Lives
Seeing Passion as a Life of Engagement
Freedom reveals the individual
Cultivating a sense of passion
It’s not what you do but how you do it
Truly Passionate Life Finds a Cause
Your cause should express your life
You should commit to a cause worth dying for
Choices must include mystery and risk
Truth Is Passionate Living
What is truth?
Truth is subjective
The paradox of living in truth
Making truth yours alone
The crowd is untruth
Why Modern Life Drains You of Passion
The present age is so dull
Kierkegaard’s attack on the media
The Internet: A modern passion-killer?
Chapter 8: Sartre’s Existentialism: Learning to Cope with Freedom
What Does It Mean to Be Free?
Freedom means always having a choice
Free choice means free action
Our most basic choice is living
What Sartre Means by “Existence Precedes Essence”
A human being is not a watch
Being human means being free
Condemned to Be Free (And Responsible) Whether You Like It or Not
The inescapability of choice
You bear sole responsibility for your choices
Freedom Is So Important Because It Brings Hope
Free choice creates value and meaning
How your choices affect you
How your choices affect the world
Freedom is the highest good
Chapter 9: Finding Authenticity: Facing Death, Conscience, and Time
Embracing Death as the Key to Life
Confronting death is essential
Keeping an eye on the inevitable: The Grim Reaper is up ahead
Making choices becomes monumentalin light of death
Meeting death alone: It’s inevitable
Conscience Nags You to Be Yourself
The voice of conscience is always there
Conscience: You talking to you about you
Face it: You’re guilty!
Chin up! Face your limitations!
The Importance of Living in Time
The everyday view: You’re in time
The existential view: Lived time
Pulling Yourself Together through Time
You always exist in the future . . .
. . . And you always exist in the past
Joining future and past . . . in the present
Chapter 10: Kierkegaard: The Task of Being a Religious Existentialist
Sickness unto Death: To Be or Not to Be Your Self
The self: A tension of opposites
The hard work of being a self: Bringing together polar opposites
Being a self before God
Despair: Attempting toescape your true self
Despair: The path to sin
Inauthentic Life Stages: Aesthetic and Ethical
The aesthetic stage: Life without choices
The ethical stage: Finding your meaning within roles
Fear and Trembling: Embracing the Religious Life
The strange story of Abraham and Isaac
Why faith must be offensive
Why Abraham is an existential hero
The problem with contemporary Christians: They lack faith
Chapter 11: Nietzsche: Mastering the Art of Individuality
Investigating Who You Are
You can take charge of who you are
You’re a sea of desire
You’re biased: You can’t help it; it’s just you!
You can change: Analyzing the falsebelief that you’re a fixed object
You can be fooled by your own language
Understanding the Self As a Chaos Made Orderly
Getting a handle on your unorganized desires
Striving for selfhood through self-mastery
Being an Individual Means Being Noble
Nobles are in control of themselves
Nobles love themselves
Nobles have contempt for nonindividuals
Relishing Change As Essential to a Noble Life
Nobles embrace change
Nobles reject dogma
The noble life is a path, not a destination
Nobility Means Striving for Power
Life is all about power
True power seeks to develop internal beauty
Powerful nobles ignore neighbors
Nobles cultivate friendships with their enemies
Nobles live dangerously
Being a Slave: Rejecting Individuality through Hatred
Coping with oppression by changing your interpretation of the situation
Learning to see through the eyes of hate
Using hatred to creatively reinterpret the world
Letting resentment take control of your life
Interpreting Christianity as just more slave talk
Mediocrity of the Herd: Rejecting Individuality through Conformity
The crowd takes away self-control
The crowd represents the voice of the weak
The crowd preaches equality and mediocrity
Beyond good and evil: Breaking away from the crowd
Part IV: The Enduring Impact of Existentialism
Chapter 12: Fear and Loathing in Existential Politics
Are Existentialists Political?
Some are political; some aren’t
Does existentialism lead to specific politics?
Does Existentialism Lead to Evil?
Real and Imaginary Flirtations with Nazism
Nietzsche wasn’t a Nazi!
The Heidegger problem: A Nazi in the family
Viva la Revolution! The French Left
The French political scene
Which Left is right? Sartre chooses Communism
Camus rejects violence
Politics of liberation versus politics of life
Chapter 13: Existentialism and Other Schools of Philosophical Thought
Existentialism’s Run in the 20th Century
Existentialism and Modern Philosophy: A Strained Relationship
Two branches of modern philosophy: Analytic and Continental
Where existentialism fits in
Postmodernism: Existentialism’s bratty stepchild
Existentialism and American philosophy
Existentialism and Philosophies of the Oppressed
Alienation and otherness
Racism as inauthenticity
Chapter 14: Doing Psychology the Existential Way
Points of Contact: Existentialism Meets Psychology
Stressing the importance of human uniqueness
Putting the patient’s world front and center
Focusing on freedom and anxiety
Seeing the people as goal directed
Finding meaning is central to your existence
The Existential Psychologists
Rollo May: Reconnecting with existence
Carl Rogers: Fully functional individuals
Viktor Frankl: Embracing the need for meaning
Part V: The Part of Tens
Chapter 15: Ten Great Existential Movies
Ikiru (1952)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Blade Runner (1982)
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
Pleasantville (1998)
Fight Club (1999)
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Superbad (2007)
Chapter 16: Ten Great Works of Existential Literature
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
Notes from the Underground, by Feodor Dostoevsky
The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy
The Trial, by Franz Kafka
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Blood of Others, by Simone de Beauvoir
Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
Run with the Hunted, by Charles Bukowski
Existentialism For Dummies®
by Christopher Panza, PhD and Gregory Gale, MA
Existentialism For Dummies®
Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
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About the Authors
Christopher Panza was born and raised in New York. After struggling unsuccessfully to figure out the meaning of his existence as a young teenager, he decided to go to the State University of New York at Purchase, where he could major in philosophy and literature and figure out all the answers. He got his degree, but no final answers to the meaning of life. After college, he spent a few more years working in business and hammering away at that meaning-of-life question. In frustration, he decided to then attend the University of Connecticut to pursue his master’s and doctoral degrees (in philosophy) in order to finally get an answer. Once again, he accumulated more degrees but arrived no closer to the meaning of life. So he figured he’d at least put his degrees to work and has worked as a professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at Drury University, in Springfield, Missouri, since 2002. He received the University’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2004, which is surprising given that he tries to infect students with the same frustrating desire to seek answers to unanswerable questions. In addition to his interests in existentialism, Chris has interests in (and teaches on) a number of other topics such as ethics, Confucianism, free will, and modern philosophy. Chris is also married and has one three-year-old daughter, Parker, with one more addition to the family on the way. Chris is hoping to infect his own children one day with the same desire to investigate life that has long invigorated him and as a result made life an interesting and mysterious experience.
Gregory Gale discovered existentialism at the tender age of 15 and has been dancing over the abyss ever since. After receiving his BA in Philosophy from the Colorado College and his MA in Philosophy from the University of Connecticut, he went wandering the earth in search of his Dasein. He has spent most of the last 15 years teaching everything from Jean-Paul Sartre to Dr. Seuss, and prides himself on making difficult material accessible to everyone. Most recently, his search for meaning, value, and a really good bourbon took him across the country in a beat-up Toyota Tercel. He wound up in Las Vegas, Nevada where he lives, works, writes, and pursues his philosophical investigations into the existential significance of Elvis Impersonators, Showgirls, and the Poker Philosophy of Doyle Brunson.
Dedication
Christopher Panza: To my wife, Christie, and my daughter, Parker, for their never ending source of love and support. Also to my mother Janice, my father Tony, and my sister Amy, all of whom have endured having a philosopher in the family for far too long.
Gregory Gale: I’d like to dedicate this book, with much love, to my father, Anthony Lloyd Gale, and my mother, Rosemary Gale. From the depth and breadth of your humanity, I learned to measure all things. I also dedicate this book to my Uncle Steve. Nietzsche said that style is a great art. You were my favorite artist.
Authors’ Acknowledgments
Christopher Panza: My primary acknowledgement is to my wife, Christie, and my daughter, Parker. Both of them had to endure many months of watching me type away at a computer instead of engaging in family-oriented projects and plans. Christie has been very understanding and supportive of this project, not to mention graciously agreeing to read and edit early drafts of a few chapters. I’d also like to thank Lisa Esposito, my department head, for helping to arrange work assignments (and for taking some on herself) so that this project could be completed. Also I’d like to thank Jason Swadley, a former student, for commenting on some early chapter drafts. Lastly, I’d like to thank Charlie Ess for agreeing to serve as the technical editor for this book and providing many good and insightful comments on how to improve the draft.
Gregory Gale: There are too many people to thank, and I apologize in advance to anyone I may have forgotten. First off, thanks to the folks at Wiley Publishing for making this such a positive experience, and for all the hard work to make Existentialism For Dummies the best book it could be. Thanks to our project editor, Tim Gallan, for all his patience, hard work, and clear direction, which has consistently kept me on the right path. Our copy editor, Sarah Faulkner, was magnificent and often knew what I was trying to say better than I did. Our acquisitions editor, Michael Lewis, helped us distill a massive subject matter into a workable project and get it ready for prime time. Charlie Ess kept us honest by policing our content and making sure we knew what we were talking about. The book is deeper and truer for his efforts. I am deeply grateful to you all for your assistance.
I owe my involvement in this project to Adam Potthast; for getting the ball rolling I am deeply grateful. Many other friends and family members also made this possible through their support and criticism. In particular, Andrea and JJ Christensen, Tara Vazquez, David Maddow, and Lorraine Miller threw themselves into the project and were a tireless source of interest, questions, encouragement, and thoughtful criticism. Each of you has contributed to this work and I appreciate each and every one of you.
Finally, I want to thank the teachers who helped make philosophy and existentialism essential parts of my life. Fr. Richard M. Jacobs got me hooked on philosophy when he introduced me to Plato at 14, and used Theology class to open my mind rather than close it. Dr. Clark “Doc” Thayer immersed me in existentialism and postmodernism. For the former I thank you, for the latter I forgive you. Thanks also to John Riker for giving me the courage to follow my heart and live the philosophy I was studying. Finally, I must thank too many professors to name in the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut for pushing me harder than I’ve ever been pushed; for teaching me that even analytic philosophy can be done with passion, flair, love, and joy; but most of all, for your understanding when I decided it was time for me to go. Thank you.
And special thanks to my brilliant and tireless partner, Chris Panza. I could not have asked for better. Hey, Chris, I think we’ve almost got that boulder up the hill. . . .
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Introduction
Existentialism is the philosophy of existence, of the nature of human existence, its value, and its meaning. Because questions about existence have very little interest when people exist as rotting corpses, existentialism is really the philosophy that studies what it is to be alive. It isn’t defined so much by any unified answer to this question, but by the way in which it rejects traditional answers to questions concerning the meaning and value of human life, and the way that it insists that such questions are real and that the lack of any real answer is a problem. Existentialists, both theist and atheist, reject not only traditional religious systems that attempt to systematically provide pat answers, but also the possibility of any ultimate answers. They insist that even if a God and a heaven exist, the meaning of this life and how you should live will always be open questions, requiring decisions you must face as an individual. Because existentialism considers the questions to be important, it seeks a way of living with the fact that no answers will be forthcoming.
The French existentialist Albert Camus says the fundamental question of philosophy is that of suicide, of whether life is worth living. Although not all the existentialists approach the question from this exact vantage point, it illustrates a widely held theme — while traditional religious and ethical systems ask, “How should I live?” the existentialist’s more fundamental question is, “How can I live?” If life is meaningless, if the inherited stories aren’t valid, how can you even approach the question of how you should live? How can human beings hungry for meaning live and flourish without giving in to despair when no meaning is provided to them?
About This Book
Although this book is about the philosophy of existentialism and about the philosophers who developed it, it isn’t a book for philosophers. It’s for you.
We try to strike a balance in writing and structure. We want to meet the needs of the student who’s encountering these issues in a classroom setting, as well as the needs of the interested layperson who’s encountering them in real life. For both, we provide what we hope is an easy-to-read introduction in which we attempt to explain the often-complex theories of the existentialists in plain, easy-to-understand language.
Existentialism is a philosophy that attempts to be relevant to real people and real lives, and we attempt to present the material in such a way as to highlight its relevance to your own life. We expect that many of the ideas we present here will resonate with your own thoughts and concerns. Although we encourage you to dive into the rich world of existential philosophy, literature, and even movies, none of that is required. Each chapter and each section stands on its own, independent not only of the other chapters, but also of any knowledge of existentialism or philosophy in general. Everyone’s welcome; come on in!
Conventions Used in This Book
Philosophy is a very precise discipline, and writing about philosophy normally requires endless caveats and multiple subclauses and clarifications that would make even a lawyer’s head swim. To make a book about the existentialists readable, we have to gloss over certain distinctions, and to keep you from hunting us down and killing us, we avoid endlessly bringing up the fine print. But with that in mind, we use the following conventions throughout the book:
The use of the term existentialism: Many people reject the notion of a unified school of thought by this name. One of the things the writers we deal with tend to have in common is that they reject the usefulness of -isms and would reject the notion that they were part of one. We feel it makes perfect sense to speak of existentialism as a school of thought, a philosophy, or even a movement as long as you understand that we aren’t using the term to imply a definitive statement of what existentialism is or of what its proponents accept or believe. Rather, when we talk about existentialism, we refer to a set of overlapping themes and concerns that unite what we recognize are often, in many respects, vastly different philosophical positions.
The use of the term existentialists: Each of the writers we deal with was fiercely independent, and many of them explicitly rejected the label. Again, we feel each of the philosophers we discuss in the book qualifies as an existentialist, by virtue of addressing a common family of concerns.
Phrases like “the existentialists believed” and “existentialism holds”: To the extent that existentialism exists at all, it exists at the intersection of, and in the overlapping content of, the thoughts of these various philosophers. Sometimes when presenting the big picture, however, we gloss over the differences among them. When we use phrases like these, you can be assured that a general tendency of those we call existentialists is to believe some version of the idea we ascribe to them as a group. Be warned, however, that with just about any general statement about this group, at least one member of the group will disagree entirely; the rest likely will agree in some sense but disagree on the fine print. Never assume from statements like these that all the existentialists believe exactly that in exactly that way.
One philosopher at a time: What the existentialists have in common are themes and concerns, such as anguish, passion, individuality, and death. In approaching these themes, we usually emphasize one philosopher at a time. For example, we focus on Nietzsche when dealing with individuality and Kierkegaard when dealing with passion. We feel this format has the advantage of focusing the discussions on these topics while giving you quality time with each philosopher. These discussions are a good way to help you get your head around the subject and understand one philosopher’s point of view. Just don’t assume that the philosopher we choose represents the final or definitive word of the existentialists on that topic.
The use of both past and present tense: Like all important movements, existentialism was both of its time and timeless. It reached its zenith in the past, and its greatest thinkers lived (and died) in the past. We give you this kind of historical information in past tense, but because existentialism is still very much alive for us, we refer to its themes and the writings of the great philosophers in the present tense.
Foolish Assumptions
Philosophers are trained to avoid assumptions, but Nietzsche said to live dangerously, so we went nuts. Here are some of the things we assume about you. We assume at least one of these things is true about you; if even one is true, this book was written for you:
You don’t wear black all the time, and you have better things to do than spend all your time drinking coffee, chain-smoking, and cursing an impotent God (unlike your coauthors, Chris and Greg).
You’ve heard the word existentialism thrown around a lot but aren’t really sure what it is and what it’s all about. You’re curious, and you want to know more.
You’re a student enrolled in a class, and you need to learn about existentialism as a whole, a particular thinker, and/or a particular existential theme.
You know about one or more of the existentialists, and you want to learn more about him or her and the movement he or she was part of.
You’re interested in art, film, literature, history, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, European history, or one of the numerous other fields of human endeavor upon which existentialism has had an impact, and you want to go to the source to learn more about it.
You’ve at some point questioned the meaning of your life or how to live, or you’ve wondered whether there’s anything more.
You’re a Christian, Hindu, atheist, Jew, or agnostic, or you have any other belief or concern about what’s ultimately true and ultimately real.
You saw that Brad Pitt movie in which a bunch of guys beat one another up and want to know what the point was.
You exist.
How This Book Is Organized
We arranged this book so that you can dive in at any point. Taking a class on Sartre? Start with Chapter 8. Kierkegaard? Go straight to Chapter 10. For those who want a general overview, we tried to structure the book so that it also tells a larger story. The book is broken up into five parts, each of which contains a number of chapters covering a related set of topics. You may consider reading Part I to get your feet wet and then skipping around to the subjects that interest you. Any way you feel like doing it works!
Part I: Introducing Existentialism
In this part, we give you a short historical introduction to existentialism and its major thinkers. Discover who they were and why they were so important to its development.
Part II: The Fundamental Problem: God Is Dead
In many respects existentialism is a response to a collection of problems that confront you as you try to live a fulfilling and meaningful life. The chapters in this part deal with recognizing and defining these problems. We examine Nietzsche’s statement that God is dead (a statement that’s about far more than just God!) as the fundamental statement of the challenges you face. We investigate how God was killed, who’s to blame, and what it really means. People feel horrible about this statement and what it means, so we discuss those feelings. Have a good cry if you want, but it isn’t necessary. Finally, we discuss what kind of world you face now that God has turned up deceased and why the problem this statement represents exists not just for atheists, but for believers as well.
Part III: Living a Meaningful Life in a Meaningless World
If the existentialists just moped and cried over everything, they’d never have been invited to any parties. Much of the existentialists’ work was devoted to finding ways of living, and even flourishing, in a world with the problems we describe in Part II. Part III is a collection of these methods, insights, and solutions. Consider it our description of their how-to guide to healthy and satisfying living.
Part IV: The Enduring Impact of Existentialism
In this part we examine the impact existentialism has had on philosophy and psychology. We examine why the impact on psychology has been so profound, why its impact on academic philosophy hasn’t been altogether great, and what this means for its overall legacy and significance.
Part V: The Part of Tens
Every For Dummies book has a Part of Tens, and we wouldn’t dream of leaving it out of this one. For ours, we decided to focus on what makes existentialism so accessible and relevant — namely, the way it finds its way (intentionally or unintentionally) into nonphilosophical, popular work. So we list ten terrific books and ten great films that deal with existential themes.
Icons Used in This Book
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Where to Go from Here
This book is arranged like an existential smorgasbord. Go where you want; take what you want! If you know nothing about existentialism at all, you may want to take a look at the first chapter. To find out who the players are and what they were doing, check out Chapter 2. Or try a sampling from Part II to see what problems existentialism is trying to tackle. Or just jump into a chapter that looks interesting. Don’t be afraid; you don’t need to know any of the other stuff to understand what’s going on.
If you’re a student, check out the Table of Contents to see what chapters deal with the thinkers or issues you’re studying. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Need more? Check out the Index, and find out everywhere we talk about Nietzsche, anguish, or lasagna. Most of the major names have at least one chapter devoted to their thinking, but they also crop up in various other places.
So where do you go from here? As Sartre might say, you’re free, so choose!
Part I
Introducing Existentialism
In this part . . .
Many ideas past and present are described as existential, but we use “existentialism” to refer specifically to a philosophical movement that came about in Europe in the late-19th century and achieved its zenith in the early- to mid-20th century. Here we put that movement into its philosophical and historical context, and introduce the individual thinkers who developed existential philosophy. Because these thinkers were so diverse and idiosyncratic, using the term “existentialist” to describe them all is somewhat controversial. We discuss the commonalities in their thinking that link them all together, if somewhat loosely, and the individual contributions of each philosopher that make him or her so important to existentialism.
Chapter 1
What Is Existentialism?
In This Chapter
Discovering what existentialism is
Understanding that existentialism is a philosophy
Seeing existentialism in an historical context
Existentialism is the philosophy that makes life possible.
As incomplete as this statement seems, when you understand what it means you’re well on your way to understanding what existentialism is all about and what the existentialists saw themselves as doing.
But if existentialism is the philosophy that makes life possible, you may ask why you need a philosophy for that. Doesn’t oxygen do a pretty good job? Yes, quite good — if all you want to do is breathe. According to the existentialists, however, you want to live a full and authentic human life, a rewarding and fulfilling life that embraces your human dignity. For that, they say, you need, at a minimum, oxygen and a healthy dose of existentialism. To understand why, it may help to consider that many philosophies come about as responses to a problem. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention.
On a very general level, the problem the existentialists were concerned with was the problem of meaning. Human beings crave meaning; they crave an orderly universe that they can make sense of. When you find that the universe isn’t going to cooperate, when you discover that the stories you’ve told yourself in an attempt to force it to have meaning have ceased to work, you feel like you’re a stranger in the world.
This historical circumstance is precisely the one that the existentialists found themselves in. As the scientific and Industrial Revolutions came to a head in the 19th century, and society became increasingly secularized, the traditional social order underwent radical change in a very short time. During this period, people began to feel disconnected from the traditional belief systems that had helped them make sense of the world and of their lives. In these conditions, people may not literally commit suicide, but a kind of spiritual death — a spiritual suicide — becomes a very real danger. It occurs when people give up to resignation and surrender in the face of what they see as the pointlessness of their existence.
Existentialism is the philosophy that recognizes this problem and attempts to address it. If you want to spruce up the description we start with, you might say that existentialism is the philosophy that makes an authentically human life possible in a meaningless and absurd world.
Because the existentialists were fiercely independent and differed widely in both their precise analyses of this problem and in the details of their responses, presenting a more detailed definition — one that’s both illuminating and accurate — is hard to do. What unites the existentialists, besides the problems of meaning and existence with which they all wrestled, is a series of themes and concerns that informed their discussion of these issues. We have, to a large extent, organized this book by these different themes and concerns.
Existentialism Is a Philosophy
If you’ve ever asked, “What does it all mean?” or “Why are we here?” or “What should I do with my life?” you’ve asked an existential question. Of course, these questions have been around since humans came down from the trees. Or at least since after they perfected farming, settled down, and had time for questions beyond “Where will I get my next meal?” and “Is the big toothy thing dangerous?” and “Will eating those mushrooms prevent me from living long enough to have offspring who will someday ask about the meaning of life?”
But asking a deep question doesn’t make you a philosopher. What makes existentialism a philosophy of existence? Philosophers analyze, they pick apart, and they try to come up with reasons for their beliefs and reasoned answers for their questions. They also tend to develop systems, but as we discuss in Chapter 3, the existentialists aren’t big fans of systems. In the most primitive times, human beings didn’t have the time or the literacy necessary for such extended reflection and investigation. Even in today’s remarkably literate society, the situation is much the same. Think of your own life. You may have asked existential questions from time to time, but between taking the kids to soccer practice, meeting your boss’s or teacher’s latest deadline, and doing your taxes, have you had the time to come up with much in the way of a detailed answer?
Is existentialism really a philosophy?
Some have argued that existentialism, especially as espoused by its earliest thinkers, can’t be called a philosophy, because philosophy seeks reasons and proceeds on the basis of rational and logical arguments. An important aspect of existentialism is its irrationalism — its belief that rationality isn’t the only or even the primary mode of human understanding and relating to the world. Further, much of the philosophy is communicated through novels, poetry, and parables. These factors have led many in the philosophical community to be dismissive of the existentialist movement as a branch of philosophy. We maintain, as many who study existentialism do, that the existentialists developed their positions and discovered much that is true through the use of careful reasoning. Does this make them hypocrites? Not at all. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s hero tells of meeting an ear that he only later realized was attached to the withered husk of a man. He is told that the ear-man is a great man, but Zarathustra believes he has suffered from having overdeveloped only one part of himself. The existentialists don’t make this mistake; they reject the exclusive or overdevelopment of reason and embrace a broader perspective, but they don’t reject their philosophical roots entirely.
Philosophy develops when a society gets to the point at which at least some of the people within it have the leisure not only to sit around asking these questions, but also to work out detailed, reasoned responses. Because of philosophy’s complex and abstract nature, it also helps if you can write this stuff down. The oral tradition is great for telling historical and religious stories. These stories have great complexity, weight, and depth, and many — like the epic of Gilgamesh — are even existential in nature. The powerful themes and concepts that underlie these stories were fully abstracted from those stories only with the advent of writing. The gods’ involvement in the battle of Troy over the most beautiful woman in the world is a great story to tell at the campfire over a few beers. You can hear it again and again until you know it by heart and can start telling it yourself and discussing what it means at the next campfire over a few more beers. Plato’s theory of the forms? Heidegger’s theory of Dasein? Sartre’s explanation of the for-itself? Not so much.
By the time philosophy got up and running, then, many of these big questions already had answers that were widely accepted — even if they weren’t true or very helpful. With pockets of exceptions and the stray rebel here and there, this general acceptance lasted until the end of the Middle Ages. Only then do you see the first real stirrings of modern existentialism, but even then, the philosophy is a quiet whisper in the wind for centuries: a monologue in Shakespeare, maybe a few stanzas in Milton. By the 18th century, elements of what became existentialism started cropping up regularly in literature and even philosophy; the whisper grew to a loud murmur. In the 19th century, it sprang to life as a cry in the desert, and by the 20th century, it was shouted from one side of the Atlantic to the other.
The Top Ten Existential Themes
What unifies the existentialists are the themes and concerns that tend to show up in their work. Here are the top ten themes that recur again and again in existential philosophy, as well as in art, literature, movies, and any number of other fields:
Absurdity: For the existentialists, life is absurd; it makes no sense and has no meaning or ultimate purpose, but human beings need it to make sense, to have meaning and purpose.
Rejection of meaning-giving narratives: It isn’t enough to say that life is absurd; the existentialists repeatedly make the point that when philosophy, religion, or science tries to make sense of it, the attempts always fail.
Alienation: This is the feeling that you’re a stranger in your own life, a stranger in the world.
Anxiety: This is the feeling of unease you get when you start to recognize that life is absurd.
Forlornness: This is the feeling of loneliness you get when you realize that no one can help you make sense of your existence.
Responsibility: Everyone bears responsibility. If no one is going to give you a guidebook to life, you have to bear responsibility for making your way through it and creating some kind of meaning for it.
Authenticity: People want authenticity — to live in a way that’s in tune with the truth of who they are as human beings and the world they live in.
Individuality: An important part of developing an authentic and satisfying life is individuality. Reason, science, and systems that try to cover up the absurdity of life often take individuality from you.
Passion/engagement: Being passionate or engaged is another important aspect of living an authentic life, and it’s under attack from the same forces that take away your individuality.
Death: This is the ultimate context for all human actions and an important source of the absurdity of life.
Why is it called existentialism?
A more technical definition of existentialism reveals the reason for its name. Existentialism is the study of existence. If you take existence to be everything that exists — such as chairs and tables, people and llamas — all philosophy, science, and religion would seem to have the same subject. But existentialism isn’t the study of everything that exists; it’s the study of existence itself — the study of what it means for something to exist at all as opposed to not existing. It’s also the study of what it means for something, as opposed to nothing, to exist at all. Of course, the primary focus of existentialism is a particular kind of existence, the kind of existence that includes existing things like you, because you’re aware of your existence and capable of questioning it.
Existentialism’s Place in the History of Philosophy
In the ancient world, philosophy was the study of everything there was to study. The specialization in most modern endeavors simply wasn’t present. This gave philosophy a broad perspective; nothing was off limits. The place of human beings in the universe and the meaning of life were questions to which the earliest philosophers gave ample attention. Thinkers from Epicurus, who advised the pursuit of pleasure, to Aristotle, who advocated the pursuit of philosophy, tried to determine what constituted the good life and how it could be attained.
Socrates and Plato, two of the earliest and greatest of the major philosophers, were particularly concerned with how a person should live. For them, the issue was moral and spiritual. Plato saw justice as the right ordering of the soul and compared the philosopher to a doctor whose job it is to look after the health and well-being of the soul. Philosophy, then, was a highly pragmatic activity aimed at living well.
As society and philosophy developed, however, this orientation changed. Over the centuries, the overall tendency in philosophy was to become more and more specialized and more and more abstract. Indeed, after Sir Isaac Newton became everyone’s paradigm for knowledge, philosophy aimed more and more at being scientific. Questions about the meaning of life and health of the soul gave way to more technical issues, well removed from the concerns of everyday life. Even ethics became a narrow discipline of separating right from wrong, as opposed to determining what makes an entire life successful.
This is where philosophy was when existentialism burst upon the scene and why existentialism was seen as such a radical departure from philosophy as it had come to be practiced. We think that in many ways existentialism represents a return to the roots of philosophy, a return to the ancients’ concern with living well and even to their concern with the health of the soul. Although most of the existentialists wouldn’t accept the existence of a soul in the sense that Plato gives it in his more spiritual moments, they were certainly concerned with the health of all those things traditionally associated with the soul, such as will, vitality, joy, and mental strength.
Chapter 2
The Big Names of Existentialism
In This Chapter
Meeting the founders of existentialism: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Becoming the establishment: Heidegger conquers academia
Storming the realm of pop culture: Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus
Going strong even today: Modern existentialists
It’s appropriate, and perhaps inevitable, that existentialism came of age in the 19th century, a period of unrest and radical social change. Science was flowering, belief in the powers of the human mind was reaching a crescendo, and the Industrial Revolution was overturning the traditional social order. Forces that had been slowly growing for centuries combined to give birth to a decidedly new way of living. The world was rushing headlong into becoming the industrial, scientific, capitalist, and mostly secular world you know today.
Born into this world were two visionary thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, who both recognized that something was missing, something was awry in this brave new world. Caught somewhere between the stale pieties of the old and the glib fascination of the new, they demanded a new assessment of what it means to be human, what it means to live, what it means to exist. Both started as the pious sons of deeply religious men. From there, they each took one of the two paths that this start often leads to; Kierkegaard became a devout Christian and a man of deeply personal faith; Nietzsche became something else. Back in grad school, coauthor Greg met a fellow student who was a Christian and wanted to study Nietzsche. Why? It’s always important, he said, to know your enemy.
In this chapter, we introduce you to the principal existentialists. Besides Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, we examine Martin Heidegger and the great French existentialists: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. Heidegger was largely responsible for the development of existentialism into a systematized and (briefly) mainstream philosophy. His pupil, Sartre, became the chief exponent of existentialism in France. Although Sartre and his circle introduced substantive and important modifications to existential philosophy, they’re perhaps best known for . . . well, being the best-known existential philosophers and for making existentialism a household name. In our last section, we discuss what has become of the legacy of the great existentialists and who, if anyone, is carrying it on.
Kierkegaard Makes Philosophy Personal
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was the son of a wealthy Dutch businessman. His father was fiercely intelligent, deeply pious, and burdened by a great melancholy. It isn’t entirely clear why, but Michael Kierkegaard believed that he lived under a great weight of guilt and that his life was accursed because of it. His guilt may have been related to a curse he made to heaven in his youth or the out-of-wedlock affair he seems to have had with Søren’s mother before marrying her. But whatever the reason, he passed this on, along with his intelligence and piety, to his son. Themes of guilt, remorse, pain, and anguish are constant in Kierkegaard’s work, which is deeply personal and often autobiographical.
The other major event that plays out repeatedly in his work is his engagement to Regina Olsen. He and Regina fell in love; the young Kierkegaard proposed, and she accepted. Just under a year after their engagement, however, Kierkegaard broke off the engagement. Only he knows why — or perhaps not even he knew for sure. In part, he seems to have thought that his melancholy made him unsuitable as a spouse, but he also seems to have magnified the decision whether or not to marry into a question of what form of life he would lead. He seems to have thought marriage was antithetical to the study and piety to which he chose to devote the rest of his life. The decision scarred him, however, and he lived the rest of his life in love with the woman he had turned away. He replayed and reexamined that decision in his writings.
Seen by many people as the founder of existentialism, Kierkegaard took his melancholy and anguish and started a path of self-discovery. What he discovered was truth not only about himself, but also about the human condition. He was one of the first to develop in an extended way (if not quite in a systematic way) central existential themes, such as the absurdity and forlornness of life, the importance and weight of choices, and the need to live passionately and authentically. He developed all these themes in a radically new kind of Christian context. He rejected the traditional pieties and systematic answers of both philosophy and the orthodox Christianity of his time. Instead, he embraced a vision of faith in which belief is considered to be a real choice and one that absolutely can’t be validated or justified by reason.
More than anything, what makes him one of the two founders of existentialism is the way he made philosophy personal. The big questions have meaning only in the way they’re lived individually by each person. Reasoned calculation or heavenly or church commandments can’t answer questions about how to live. You must answer these concrete questions in the depths of your individual soul. You must answer questions about how to live, whether to believe, and what to do in loneliness and isolation.
Nietzsche Declares that God Is Dead
Although many people call Kierkegaard the founder of existentialism, imagining it without Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is hard. Many would give him as much if not more credit for getting the existential ball rolling. Yet he stands apart from the movement he helped to create. It’s been said that calling Nietzsche an existentialist is like calling Jesus a Christian; both are the ground of everything that follows, but they transcend it at the same time. You could also say that calling Nietzsche the father of existentialism is like calling George Washington the father of Philadelphia. Nietzsche is one of the great, enigmatic thinkers of human history. Existentialism is certainly his child, but he has many, many children and a towering legacy all by himself.
Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor who was the latest in a long line of clergy in the family. Nietzsche was headed to the same life, and he embraced it with a deep piety in his youth. Nietzsche criticized religion as an insider, or former insider, as someone who knew more about Christianity and its significance than most practitioners did. Like many who lose their faith, Nietzsche spent much of his life criticizing the church for the falsehoods he felt he had been taught.
He didn’t stop at the church. Nietzsche was a perceptive social critic, and little escaped his vitriol. He tore down everything he saw as false, deluded, and damaging to human flourishing. But Nietzsche wasn’t simply an agent of destruction. In The Gay Science, he spoke of wanting to be only a yes-sayer, to find a way to affirm everything in life. Existentialism gets its fundamental optimism from Nietzsche. He had the sense that after we tear down the veil of falsehoods we’ve created for ourselves, we can love the world for what it really is and create a meaning that’s sustaining and even joyous.
To this end, Nietzsche made his work into a literary dance of destruction, creation, and celebration. At times it’s shrill, at other times poetic, but it’s always playful and evades easy interpretation or systemization. Nietzsche wrote in less traditional forms than any other existentialist. He often wrote in the form of relatively short, impressionistic vignettes. In this seemingly chaotic but brilliantly orchestrated maelstrom of thought, certain themes reappear, resonate with other passages, and slowly form into more or less concrete, if somewhat slippery, ideas. Of these, we focus on those that are most important to later existentialism, particularly his belief that the world comes to you as meaningless and that creation — of values, of yourself, of the meaning of your life — is your fundamental task. It was Nietzsche who announced that God is dead, and as we explain in detail in Chapter 3, this statement, properly understood, is the start of all existentialism, even that of Kierkegaard and the Christian existentialists.
Heidegger Systematizes Existentialism
Like John the Baptist, the early existentialists had cried almost incoherently in the desert. Their writings were read by few people and understood by far fewer. Because of their playfulness, their nontraditional writing styles, and the extremely personal content of Kierkegaard’s writing in particular, the existentialists were easy for mainstream philosophy to ignore, marginalize, and forget. These nuts babbling about anguish and meaning? Nonsense! Philosophy was continuing on its traditional, rationalistic path. Increasingly, that meant squaring philosophy with science, with the objective and the universal, not with the individual and the personal.
In British and American philosophy, it has stayed on that course pretty much to this day. In Europe, a growing number of people recognized that this path didn’t have all the answers it was promising. What existentialism was lacking, however, was respectability. It needed the treatment — the philosophical development of its ideas into a great work, an expansive and systematic work that the academics could recognize as being something deserving of their attention and their respect. This happened not once, but twice — first with Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, and then with his pupil Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. (We discuss Sartre in the next section.)
Of all the existentialists, it was Heidegger (1889–1976) who was most purely an academic, most purely a philosopher. Although many of the ideas within his philosophy are radical, even revolutionary, he presents them with all the trappings of traditional, academic philosophy. Like his mentor, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger attempted to describe and analyze existence in a way that had the rigor and completeness of Newtonian physics but started from the inside, from the subjective, human point of view. But what made Heidegger’s treatment different was the serious attention he gave to such existential themes as irrationalism, the importance of interpretation, living authentically, and the significance of death in defining human existence.
It was Heidegger who put the exist into existentialism. Heidegger was concerned not only with living, but also with what it means to be (as opposed to not be). In one sense, then, he made existentialism into a science of being. Yet, starting as it does from the subjective point of view, it’s a science that never objectifies human beings. Indeed, he was at pains to avoid the kind of systematizing in which things lose their identity. An important element in his philosophy is the way people categorize their experience using words, and this process is often alienating. Perhaps, then, none of the figures we refer to as existentialists would object to the label so strenuously as Heidegger. Heidegger’s work does go significantly beyond what we describe as existential concerns, and he’s seen as a major figure in other movements, such as postmodernism. His elucidation of crucial existential themes and his impact upon later existentialists make him impossible to leave out, however. Sorry, Marty.
The French Popularize a Growing Movement
You aren’t reading this book because of a lonely Dutchman. You aren’t reading this book because of a wild-eyed, self-appointed antichrist who tried re-imagining . . . well, everything. You certainly aren’t reading this book because a one-time member of the Nazi party wrote one of the most important, but also one of the densest and most indecipherable books ever written. No, you’re reading this book because for a brief period in the 1940s and 1950s, nothing was cooler than existentialism. And like Bogart, Elvis, and bomber jackets, it’s managed to stay cool and stay relevant. You’re reading this book because a few — three, mostly — French philosophers interjected existentialism into the consciousness of Western civilization. They interjected it into art, literature, the counterculture, and the fabric of society.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) took the traditional existential themes and injected a renewed emphasis upon the meaning and importance of human freedom. Although Being and Nothingness
