Existentialism
First published Mon Aug 23, 2004;
substantive revision Mon Oct 11, 2010
Like “rationalism” and “empiricism,”
“existentialism” is a term that belongs to intellectual history. Its definition
is thus to some extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly
adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide
dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and
his associates—notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert
Camus—existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished
in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the major philosophers identified as
existentialists (many of whom—for instance Camus and Heidegger—repudiated the
label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean
Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, the Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset and
Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The
nineteenth century philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche,
came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a
literary phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartre's own ideas were and are
better known through his fictional works (such as Nausea and No Exit)
than through his more purely philosophical ones (such as Being and
Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason), and the postwar
years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the
term: retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted; in Paris
there were Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel
Beckett; the Norwegian Knut Hamsun and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belong to
the club; artists such as Alberto Giacometti and even Abstract Expressionists
such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers
such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential
terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a
cliché, parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen.
It is sometimes suggested,
therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather
than an identifiable philosophical position; or, alternatively, that the term
should be restricted to Sartre's philosophy alone. But while a philosophical
definition of existentialism may not entirely ignore the cultural fate of the
term, and while Sartre's thought must loom large in any account of
existentialism, the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of
philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current
of twentieth- and now twenty-first century philosophical inquiry, one that has
had significant impact on fields such as theology (through Rudolf Bultmann,
Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others) and psychology (from Ludwig Binswanger
and Medard Boss to Otto Rank, R. D. Laing, and Viktor Frankl). What makes this
current of inquiry distinct is not its concern with “existence” in general, but
rather its claim that thinking about human existence requires new
categories not found in the conceptual repertoire of ancient or modern thought;
human beings can be understood neither as substances with fixed properties, nor
as subjects interacting with a world of objects.
On the existential view, to
understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that
natural science—including the science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist
who holds that human beings are composed of independent substances—“mind” and
“body”—is no better off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that
human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental
physical constituents of the universe. Existentialism does not deny the
validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other
sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism,
development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be
fully understood in terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by
supplementing our scientific picture with a moral one. Categories of
moral theory such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue,
and the like do capture important aspects of the human condition, but
neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor
scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices.
“Existentialism”, therefore, may be
defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of
categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp
human existence. To approach existentialism in this categorial way may seem to
conceal what is often taken to be its “heart” (Kaufmann 1968:12), namely, its
character as a gesture of protest against academic philosophy, its anti-system
sensibility, its flight from the “iron cage” of reason. But while it is true
that the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather
uncommon in our own time, and while the idea that philosophy cannot be
practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective science is indeed central
to existentialism, it is equally true that all the themes popularly associated
with existentialism—dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom,
commitment, nothingness, and so on—find their philosophical significance in the
context of the search for a new categorial framework, together with its
governing norm.
- 1. The Emergence of Existence as a
Philosophical Problem
- 2. “Existence Precedes Essence”
- 3. Freedom and Value
- 4. Politics, History, Engagement
- 5. Existentialism Today
- Bibliography
- Other Internet Resources
- Related Entries
Sartre's existentialism drew its
immediate inspiration from the work of the German philosopher, Martin
Heidegger. Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time, an inquiry into the “being
that we ourselves are” (which he termed “Dasein,” a German word for existence),
introduced most of the motifs that would characterize later existentialist
thinking: the tension between the individual and the “public”; an emphasis on
the worldly or “situated” character of human thought and reason; a fascination
with liminal experiences of anxiety, death, the “nothing” and nihilism; the
rejection of science (and above all, causal explanation) as an adequate
framework for understanding human being; and the introduction of “authenticity”
as the norm of self-identity, tied to the project of self-definition through
freedom, choice, and commitment. Though in 1946 Heidegger would repudiate the
retrospective labelling of his earlier work as existentialism, it is in that
work that the relevant concept of existence finds its first systematic
philosophical formulation.[1]
As Sartre and Merleau-Ponty would
later do, Heidegger pursued these issues with the somewhat unlikely resources
of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method. And while not all existential
philosophers were influenced by phenomenology (for instance Jaspers and
Marcel), the philosophical legacy of existentialism is largely tied to the form
it took as an existential version of phenomenology. Husserl's efforts in the
first decades of the twentieth century had been directed toward establishing a
descriptive science of consciousness, by which he understood not the object of
the natural science of psychology but the “transcendental” field of intentionality,
i.e., that whereby our experience is meaningful, an experience of
something as something. The existentialists welcomed Husserl's doctrine
of intentionality as a refutation of the Cartesian view according to which
consciousness relates immediately only to its own representations, ideas,
sensations. According to Husserl, consciousness is our direct openness to the
world, one that is governed categorially (normatively) rather than causally;
that is, intentionality is not a property of the individual mind but the
categorial framework in which mind and world become intelligible.[2]
A phenomenology of consciousness,
then, explores neither the metaphysical composition nor the causal genesis of
things, but the “constitution” of their meaning. Husserl employed this method
to clarify our experience of nature, the socio-cultural world, logic, and
mathematics, but Heidegger argued that he had failed to raise the most
fundamental question, that of the “meaning of being” as such. In turning
phenomenology toward the question of what it means to be, Heidegger
insists that the question be raised concretely: it is not at first some
academic exercise but a burning concern arising from life itself, the question
of what it means for me to be. Existential themes take on salience when
one sees that the general question of the meaning of being involves first
becoming clear about one's own being as an inquirer. According to Heidegger,
the categories bequeathed by the philosophical tradition for understanding a
being who can question his or her being are insufficient: traditional
concepts of a substance decked out with reason, or of a subject blessed with
self-consciousness, misconstrue our fundamental character as
“being-in-the-world.” In his phenomenological pursuit of the categories that
govern being-in-the-world, Heidegger became the reluctant father of
existentialism because he drew inspiration from two seminal, though in academic
circles then relatively unknown, nineteenth-century writers, Sören Kierkegaard
and Friedrich Nietzsche. One can find anticipations of existential thought in
many places (for instance, in Socratic irony, Augustine, Pascal, or the late
Schelling), but the roots of the problem of existence in its contemporary
significance lie in the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Kierkegaard developed this problem
in the context of his radical approach to Christian faith; Nietzsche did so in
light of his thesis of the death of God. Subsequent existential thought
reflects this difference: while some writers—such as Sartre and Beauvoir,—were
resolutely atheist in outlook, others—such as Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, and
Buber—variously explored the implications of the concept “authentic existence”
for religious consciousness. Though neither Nietzsche's nor Kierkegaard's
thought can be reduced to a single strand, both took an interest in what
Kierkegaard termed “the single individual.” Both were convinced that this
singularity, what is most my own, “me,” could be meaningfully reflected upon
while yet, precisely because of its singularity, remaining invisible to
traditional philosophy, with its emphasis either on what follows unerring
objective laws of nature or else conforms to the universal standards of moral
reason. A focus on existence thus led, in both, to unique textual strategies
quite alien to the philosophy of their time—and ours.
In Kierkegaard, the singularity of
existence comes to light at the moment of conflict between ethics and religious
faith. Suppose it is my sense of doing God's will that makes my life
meaningful. How does philosophy conceive this meaning? Drawing here on Hegel as
emblematic of the entire tradition, Kierkegaard, in his book Fear and
Trembling, argues that for philosophy my life becomes meaningful when I
“raise myself to the universal” by bringing my immediate (natural) desires and
inclinations under the moral law, which represents my “telos” or what I ought
to be. In doing so I lose my individuality (since the law holds for all)
but my actions become meaningful in the sense of understandable, governed by a
norm. Now a person whose sense of doing God's will is what gives her life
meaning will be intelligible just to the extent that her action conforms to the
universal dictates of ethics. But what if, as in case of Abraham's sacrifice of
his son, the action contradicts what ethics demands? Kierkegaard[3]
believes both that Abraham's life is supremely meaningful (it is not
simply a matter of some immediate desire or meaningless tic that overcomes
Abraham's ethical consciousness; on the contrary, doing the moral thing is itself
in this case his tempting inclination) and that philosophy cannot
understand it, thus condemning it in the name of ethics. God's command here
cannot be seen as a law that would pertain to all; it addresses Abraham in his
singularity. If Abraham's life is meaningful, it represents, from a
philosophical point of view, the “paradox” that through faith the “single
individual is higher than the universal.” Existence as a philosophical problem
appears at this point: if there is a dimension to my being that is both
meaningful and yet not governed by the rational standard of morality, by what
standard is it governed? For unless there is some standard it is idle to
speak of “meaning.”
To solve this problem there must be
a norm inherent in singularity itself, and, in his Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, Kierkegaard tries to express such a norm in his claim that
“subjectivity is the truth,” an idea that prefigures the existential concept of
authenticity. Abraham has no objective reason to think that the command he
hears comes from God; indeed, based on the content of the command he has every
reason, as Kant pointed out in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone,
to think that it cannot come from God. His sole justification is what
Kierkegaard calls the passion of faith. Such faith is, rationally
speaking, absurd, a “leap,” so if there is to be any talk of truth here it is a
standard that measures not the content of Abraham's act, but the way in
which he accomplishes it. To perform the movement of faith “subjectively” is to
embrace the paradox as normative for me in spite of its absurdity, rather than
to seek an escape from it by means of objective textual exegesis, historical
criticism, or some other strategy for translating the singularity of my
situation into the universal. Because my reason cannot help here, the normative
appropriation is a function of my “inwardness” or passion. In this way I
“truly” become what I nominally already am. To say that subjectivity is the
truth is to highlight a way of being, then, and not a mode of knowing; truth
measures the attitude (“passion”) with which I appropriate, or make my own, an
“objective uncertainty” (the voice of God) in a “process of highest
inwardness.”
In contrast to the singularity of
this movement, for Kierkegaard, stands the crowd: “the crowd is untruth.” The
crowd is, roughly, public opinion in the widest sense—the ideas that a given
age takes for granted; the ordinary and accepted way of doing things; the
complacent attitude that comes from the conformity necessary for social
life—and what condemns it to “untruth” in Kierkegaard's eyes is the way that it
insinuates itself into an individual's own sense of who she is, relieving her
of the burden of being herself: if everyone is a Christian there is no need for
me to “become” one. Since it is a measure not of knowing but of being, one can
see how Kierkegaard answers those who object that his concept of subjectivity
as truth is based on an equivocation: the objective truths of science and
history, however well-established, are in themselves matters of indifference;
they belong to the crowd. It is not insofar as truth can be established
objectively that it takes on meaning, but rather insofar as it is appropriated
“passionately” in its very uncertainty. To “exist” is always to be confronted
with this question of meaning. The truths that matter to who one is cannot,
like Descartes' morale definitif, be something to be attained only when
objective science has completed its task.
For Kierkegaard existence emerges as
a philosophical problem in the struggle to think the paradoxical presence of
God; for Nietzsche it is found in the reverberations of the phrase “God is
dead,” in the challenge of nihilism.
Responding in part to the cultural
situation in nineteenth-century Europe—historical scholarship continuing to
erode fundamentalist readings of the Bible, the growing cultural capital of the
natural sciences, and Darwinism in particular—and in part driven by his own
investigations into the psychology and history of moral concepts, Nietzsche
sought to draw the consequences of the death of God, the collapse of any
theistic support for morality. Like his contemporary, Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose
character, Ivan, in The Brothers Karamazov, famously argues that if God
does not exist then everything is permitted, Nietzsche's overriding concern is
to find a way to take the measure of human life in the modern world. Unlike
Dostoevsky, however, Nietzsche sees a complicity between morality and the
Christian God that perpetuates a life-denying, and so ultimately nihilistic,
stance. Nietzsche was not the first to de-couple morality from its divine
sanction; psychological theories of the moral sentiments, developed since the
eighteenth century, provided a purely human account of moral normativity. But
while these earlier theories had been offered as justifications of the
normative force of morality, Nietzsche's idea that behind moral prescriptions
lies nothing but “will to power” undermined that authority. On the account
given in On the Genealogy of Morals, the Judeo-Christian moral order
arose as an expression of the ressentiment of the weak against the power
exercised over them by the strong. A tool used to thwart that power, it had
over time become internalized in the form of conscience, creating a “sick”
animal whose will is at war with its own vital instincts. Thus Nietzsche
arrived at Kierkegaard's idea that “the crowd is untruth”: the so-called
autonomous, self-legislating individual is nothing but a herd animal that has
trained itself to docility and unfreedom by conforming to the “universal”
standards of morality. The normative is nothing but the normal.
Yet this is not the end of the story
for Nietzsche, any more than it was for Kierkegaard. If the autonomous
individual has so far signified nothing but herd mentality—if moral norms arose
precisely to produce such conformists—the individual nevertheless has the
potential to become something else, the sick animal is “pregnant with a
future.” Nietzsche saw that in the nineteenth century the “highest values” had
begun to “devalue themselves.” For instance, the Christian value of
truth-telling, institutionalized in the form of science, had undermined the
belief in God, disenchanting the world and excluding from it any pre-given
moral meaning. In such a situation the individual is forced back upon himself.
On the one hand, if he is weakly constituted he may fall victim to despair in
the face of nihilism, the recognition that life has no instrinsic meaning. On
the other hand, for a “strong” or creative individual nihilism presents a
liberating opportunity to take responsibility for meaning, to exercise
creativity by “transvaluing” her values, establishing a new “order of rank.”
Through his prophet, Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagined such a person as the
“overman” (Übermensch), the one who teaches “the meaning of the earth”
and has no need of otherworldly supports for the values he embodies. The
overman represents a form of life, a mode of existence, that is to blossom from
the communalized, moralized “last man” of the nineteenth century. He has
understood that nihilism is the ultimate meaning of the moral point of view,
its life-denying essence, and he reconfigures the moral idea of autonomy so as
to release the life-affirming potential within it.
Thus, for Nietzsche, existence
emerges as a philosophical problem in his distinction between moral autonomy
(as obedience to the moral law) and an autonomy “beyond good an evil.” But if
one is to speak of autonomy, meaning, and value at all, the mode of being
beyond good and evil cannot simply be a lawless state of arbitrary and
impulsive behavior. If such existence is to be thinkable there must be a
standard by which success or failure can be measured. Nietzsche variously
indicates such a standard in his references to “health,” “strength,” and “the
meaning of the earth.” Perhaps his most instructive indication, however, comes from
aesthetics, since its concept of style, as elaborated in The Gay
Science, provides a norm appropriate to the singularity of existence. To
say that a work of art has style is to invoke a standard for judging it, but
one that cannot be specified in the form of a general law of which the work
would be a mere instance. Rather, in a curious way, the norm is internal to the
work. For Nietzsche, existence falls under such an imperative of style: to
create meaning and value in a world from which all transcendent supports have
fallen away is to give unique shape to one's immediate inclinations, drives,
and passions; to interpret, prune, and enhance according to a unifying
sensibility, a ruling instinct, that brings everything into a whole that
satisfies the non-conceptual, aesthetic norm of what fits, what belongs, what
is appropriate.
As did Kierkegaard, then, Nietzsche
uncovers an aspect of my being that can be understood neither in terms of
immediate drives and inclinations nor in terms of a universal law of behavior,
an aspect that is measured not in terms of an objective inventory of what
I am but in terms of my way of being it. Neither Kierkegaard nor
Nietzsche, however, developed this insight in a fully systematic way. That
would be left to their twentieth-century heirs.
Sartre's slogan—“existence precedes
essence”—may serve to introduce what is most distinctive of existentialism,
namely, the idea that no general, non-formal account of what it means to be
human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing
itself. Existence is “self-making-in-a-situation” (Fackenheim 1961:37). In
contrast to other entities, whose essential properties are fixed by the kind
of entities they are, what is essential to a human being—what makes her who
she is—is not fixed by her type but by what she makes of herself, who she
becomes.[4]
The fundamental contribution of existential thought lies in the idea that one's
identity is constituted neither by nature nor by culture, since to “exist” is
precisely to constitute such an identity. It is in light of this idea that key
existential notions such as facticity, transcendence (project), alienation, and
authenticity must be understood.
At first, it seems hard to
understand how one can say much about existence as such. Traditionally,
philosophers have connected the concept of existence with that of essence in
such a way that the former signifies merely the instantiation of the
latter. If “essence” designates what a thing is and “existence” that
it is, it follows that what is intelligible about any given thing, what can be
thought about it, will belong to its essence. It is from essence in this
sense—say, human being as rational animal or imago Dei—that ancient
philosophy drew its prescriptions for an individual's way of life, its
estimation of the meaning and value of existence. Having an essence meant that
human beings could be placed within a larger whole, a kosmos, that
provided the standard for human flourishing. Modern philosophy retained this
framework even as it abandoned the idea of a “natural place” for man in the
face of the scientific picture of an infinite, labyrinthine universe. In what
looks like a proto-existential move, Descartes rejected the traditional
essential definitions of man in favor of a radical, first-person reflection on
his own existence, the “I am.” Nevertheless, he quickly reinstated the old
model by characterizing his existence as that of a substance determined by an
essential property, “thinking.” In contrast, Heidegger proposes that “I” am “an
entity whose what [essence] is precisely to be and nothing but to be”
(Heidegger 1985:110; 1962:67). Such an entity's existing cannot, therefore, be
thought as the instantiation of an essence, and consequently what it means to
be such an entity cannot be determined by appeal to pre-given frameworks or
systems—whether scientific, historical, or philosophical.
Of course, there is a sense in which
human beings do instantiate essences, as Heidegger's phrase already admits.[5]
But what matters for existential thought is the manner of such
instantiation, the way of existing. What this means can be seen by
contrasting human existence with the modes of being Heidegger terms the
“available” (or “ready-to-hand,” zuhanden) and the “occurrent” (or
“present-at-hand,” vorhanden). Entities of the first sort, exemplified
by tools as they present themselves in use, are defined by the social practices
in which they are employed, and their properties are established in relation to
the norms of those practices. A saw is sharp, for instance, in relation to what
counts as successful cutting. Entities of the second sort, exemplified by
objects of perceptual contemplation or scientific investigation, are defined by
the norms governing perceptual givenness or scientific theory-construction. An
available or occurrent entity instantiates some property if that property is
truly predicated of it. Human beings can be considered in this way as well.
However, in contrast to the previous cases, the fact that natural and social
properties can truly be predicated of human beings is not sufficient to
determine what it is for me to be a human being. This, the
existentialists argue, is because such properties are never merely brute
determinations of who I am but are always in question. Who I am depends on what
I make of my “properties”; they matter to me in a way that is impossible
for merely available and occurrent entities. As Heidegger puts it, existence is
“care” (Sorge): to exist is not simply to be, but to be an issue
for oneself. In Sartre's terms, while other entities exist “in themselves” (en
soi) and “are what they are,” human reality is also “for itself” (pour
soi) and thus is not exhausted by any of its determinations. It is what it
is not and is not what it is (Sartre 1992:112).
Human existence, then, cannot be thought
through categories appropriate to things: substance, event, process. There is
something of an internal distinction in existence that undermines such
attempts, a distinction that existential philosophers try to capture in the
categories of “facticity” and “transcendence.” To be is to co-ordinate these
opposed moments in some way, and who I am, my essence, is nothing but my manner
of co-ordinating them. In this sense human beings make themselves in situation:
what I am cannot be separated from what I take myself to be. In Charles
Taylor's phrase, human beings are “self-interpreting animals” (Taylor 1985:45),
where the interpretation is constitutive of the interpreter. If such a view is
not to collapse into contradiction the notions of facticity and transcendence
must be elucidated. Risking some oversimplification, they can be approached as
the correlates of the two attitudes I can take toward myself: the attitude of
third-person theoretical observer and the attitude of first-person practical
agent.
Facticity includes all those
properties that third-person investigation can establish about me: natural
properties such as weight, height, and skin color; social facts such as race,
class, and nationality; psychological properties such as my web of belief, desires,
and character traits; historical facts such as my past actions, my family
background, and my broader historical milieu; and so on.[6]
I am not originally aware of my facticity in this third-person way; rather, it
is manifest in my moods as a kind of burden, the weight of “having to be.”
However, I can adopt a third-person or objectifying stance toward my own
being, and then these aspects of my facticity may appear precisely as that
which defines or determines who I am. From an existential point of view,
however, this would be an error—not because these aspects of my being
are not real or factual, but because the kind of being that I am cannot
be defined in factual, or third-person, terms.[7]
These elements of facticity cannot be said to belong to me in the way that the
color of an apple belongs to the apple, for as belonging to me, as
“determining” me, they have always already been interpreted by me.
Though third-person observation can identify skin color, class, or ethnicity,
the minute it seeks to identify them as mine it must contend with the
distinctive character of the existence I possess. There is no sense in which
facticity is both mine and merely a matter of fact, since my
existence—the kind of being I am—is also defined by the stance I take toward my
facticity. This is what existential philosophers call “transcendence.”
Transcendence refers to that
attitude toward myself characteristic of my practical engagement in the world,
the agent's perspective. An agent is oriented by the task at hand as something
to be brought about through its own will or agency. Such orientation does not
take itself as a theme but loses itself in what is to be done. Thereby, things
present themselves not as indifferent givens, facts, but as meaningful:
salient, expedient, obstructive, and so on. To speak of “transcendence” here is
to indicate that the agent “goes beyond” what simply is toward what can be: the
factual—including the agent's own properties—always emerges in light of the
possible, where the possible is not a function of anonymous forces
(third-person or logical possibility) but a function of the agent's choice
and decision.[8]
Just as this suddenly empty pen is either a nettlesome impediment to my
finishing this article, or a welcome occasion for doing something else,
depending on how I determine my behavior in relation to it, so too my own
factic properties—such as irrascibility, laziness, or bourgeois
workaholism—take on meaning (become functioning reasons) on the basis of how I
endorse or disavow them in the present action.
Existentialists tend to describe the
perspective of engaged agency in terms of “choice,” and they are sometimes
criticized for this. It may be—the argument runs—that I can be said to choose a
course of action at the conclusion of a process of deliberation, but there
seems to be no choice involved when, in the heat of the moment, I toss the
useless pen aside in frustration. Can its being useless be traced back to my
“choice” to be frustrated? But the point in using such language is simply to
insist that in the first-person perspective of agency I cannot conceive
myself as determined by anything that is available to me only in third-person
terms. Behind the existentialist's insistence that facticity and transcendence
remain irreducible aspects of one and the same being is the insight that, for a
being who can say “I,” the third-person perspective on who one is has no more
authority than the first-person (agent's) perspective.[9]
Because existence is co-constituted
by facticity and transcendence, the self cannot be conceived as a Cartesian ego
but is embodied being-in-the-world, a self-making in situation. It is through
transcendence—or what the existentialists also refer to as my “projects”—that
the world is revealed, takes on meaning; but such projects are themselves
factic or “situated”—not the product of some antecedently constituted “person”
or intelligible character but embedded in a world that is decidedly not my
representation. Because my projects are who I am in the mode of engaged
agency (and not like plans that I merely represent to myself in reflective
deliberation), the world in a certain sense reveals to me who I am. For reasons
to be explored in the next section, the meaning of my choice is not always
transparent to me. Nevertheless, because it necessarily reveals the world in a
certain way, that meaning, my own “identity,” can be discovered by what Sartre
calls “existential psychoanalysis.” By understanding an individual's patterns
of behavior—that is, by reconstructing the meaningful world that such behavior
reveals—one can uncover the “fundamental project” or basic choice of oneself
that gives distinctive shape to an individual life. Sartre's view represents a
kind of compromise between the first- and third-person perspectives: like the
latter, it objectifies the person and treats its open-ended practical horizons
as in a certain sense closed; like the former, however, it seeks to understand
the choices from the inside, to grasp the identity of the individual as a
matter of the first-person meaning that haunts him, rather than as a function
of inert psychic mechanisms with which the individual has no acquaintance.[10]
The anti-Cartesian view of the self
as in situation yields the familiar existential theme of the “alienated” self,
the estrangement of the self both from the world and from itself. In the first
place, though it is through my projects that world takes on meaning, the world
itself is not brought into being through my projects; it retains it otherness
and thus can come forth as utterly alien, as unheimlich. Sometimes
translated as “uncanny,” this Heideggerian word's stem (Heim, “home”)
points, instead, to the strangeness of a world in which I precisely do not
feel “at home.” (see the section on The Ideality of Values below). This experience, basic to existential thought,
contrasts most sharply with the ancient notion of a kosmos in which
human beings have a well-ordered place, and it connects existential thought
tightly to the modern experience of a meaningless universe.
In the second place, the world
includes other people, and as a consequence I am not merely the revealer of the
world but something revealed in the projects of those others. Thus who I am is
not merely a function of my own projects, but is also a matter of my
“being-for-others.” Sartre (1992:340-58) brings out this form of alienation in
his famous analysis of “the Look.” So long as I am engaged unreflectively in a
certain practice I am nothing but that first-person perspective which
constitutes things as having a distinctive salience in light of what I am
doing. I am absorbed in the world and do not experience myself as having an
“outside”; that is, I do not understand my action through some third-person
description, as an instance of some general behavior. However, when I become
aware of being looked at (that is, when my subjectivity is invaded by the
subjectivity of another for whom I am merely part of the world, an item for her
projects ), I become aware of having a “nature,” a “character,” of being or
doing something. I am not merely looking through a keyhole; I am a voyeur.
I cannot originally experience myself as something—a voyeur, for
instance; it is the other who gives rise to this mode of my being, a mode that
I acknowledge as mine (and not merely the other's opinion of me) in the shame
in which I register it. It is because there are others in the world that I can
take a third-person perspective on myself; but this reveals the extent to which
I am alienated from a dimension of my being: who I am in an objective
sense can be originally revealed only by the Other. This has implications for
existential social theory (see the section on Sartre: Existentialism and Marxism below).
Finally, the self-understanding, or
project, thanks to which the world is there for me in a meaningful way, already
belongs to that world, derives from it, from the tradition or society in which
I find myself. Though it is “me,” it is not me “as my own.” My very engagement
in the world alienates me from my authentic possibility. This theme is brought
out most clearly by Heidegger: the anti-Cartesian idea that the self is defined
first of all by its practical engagement entails that this self is not properly
individual but rather indisinguishable from anyone else (das Man) who
engages in such practices: such a “they-self” does what “one” does. The idea is
something like this: Practices can allow things to show up as meaningful—as
hammers, dollar bills, or artworks—because practices involve aims that carry
with them norms, satisfaction conditions, for what shows up in them. But norms
and rules, as Wittgenstein has shown, are essentially public, and that means
that when I engage in practices I must be essentially interchangeable with
anyone else who does: I eat as one eats; I drive as one drives; I even protest
as one protests. To the extent that my activity is to be an instance of such a
practice, I must do it in the normal way. Deviations can be recognized as
deviations only against this norm, and if they deviate too far they can't be
recognized at all.[11]
Thus, if who I am is defined through existing, this “who” is normally
pre-defined by what is average, by the roles available to me in my culture, and
so on. The “I” that gets defined is thereby “anonymous,” or “anyone”;
self-making is largely a function of not distinguishing myself from
others.
If there is nevertheless good sense
in talking of the singularity of my existence, it will not be something with
which one starts but something that gets achieved in recovering oneself
from alienation or lostness in the “crowd.” If the normative is first of all the
normal, however, it might seem that talk about a norm for the singularity
of existence, a standard for thinking about what is my ownmost just as I
myself, would be incoherent. It is here that the idea of “authenticity” must
come into focus.
By what standard are we to think our
efforts “to be,” our manner of being a self? If such standards traditionally
derive from the essence that a particular thing instantiates—this hammer is a
good one if it instantiates what a hammer is supposed to be—and if there is
nothing that a human being is, by its essence, supposed to be, can the
meaning of existence at all be thought? Existentialism arises with the collapse
of the idea that philosophy can provide substantive norms for existing, ones
that specify particular ways of life. Nevertheless, there remains the
distinction between what I do “as” myself and as “anyone,” so in this sense
existing is something at which I can succeed or fail. Authenticity—in German, Eigentlichkeit—names
that attitude in which I engage in my projects as my own (eigen).
What this means can perhaps be
brought out by considering moral evaluations. In keeping my promise I act in
accord with duty; and if I keep it because it is my duty, I also act
morally (according to Kant) because I am acting for the sake of duty.
But existentially there is still a further evaluation to be made. My moral act
is inauthentic if, in keeping my promise for the sake of duty, I do so
because that is what “one” does (what “moral people” do). But I can do the same
thing authentically if, in keeping my promise for the sake of duty,
acting this way is something I choose as my own, something to which,
apart from its social sanction, I commit myself. Similarly, doing the right
thing from a fixed and stable character—which virtue ethics considers a
condition of the good—is not beyond the reach of existential evaluation: such
character may simply be a product of my tendency to “do what one does,”
including feeling “the right way” about things and betaking myself in
appropriate ways as one is expected to do. But such character might also be a
reflection of my choice of myself, a commitment I make to be a
person of this sort. In both cases I have succeeded in being good; only in the
latter case, however, have I succeeded in being myself.[12]
Thus the norm of authenticity refers
to a kind of “transparency” with regard to my situation, a recognition that I
am a being who can be responsible for who I am. In choosing in light of
this norm I can be said to recover myself from alienation, from my absorption
in the anonymous “one-self” that characterizes me in my everyday engagement in
the world. Authenticity thus indicates a certain kind of integrity—not that of
a pre-given whole, an identity waiting to be discovered, but that of a project
to which I can either commit myself (and thus “become” what it entails) or else
simply occupy for a time, inauthentically drifting in and out of various
affairs. Some writers have taken this notion a step further, arguing that the
measure of an authentic life lies in the integrity of a narrative, that
to be a self is to constitute a story in which a kind of wholeness prevails, to
be the author of oneself as a unique individual (Nehamas 1998; Ricoeur 1992).
In contrast, the inauthentic life would be one without such integrity, one in
which I allow my life-story to be dictated by the world. Be that as it may, it
is clear that one can commit oneself to a life of chamealeon-like variety, as
does Don Juan in Kierkegaard's version of the legend. Even interpreted
narratively, then, the norm of authenticity remains a formal one. As with
Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, one cannot tell who is authentic by looking at
the content of their lives.[13]
Authenticity defines a condition on
self-making: do I succeed in making myself, or will who I am merely be a
function of the roles I find myself in? Thus to be authentic can also be
thought as a way of being autonomous. In choosing “resolutely”—that is, in
commiting myself to a certain course of action, a certain way of being in the
world—I have given myself the rule that belongs to the role I come to adopt.
The inauthentic person, in contrast, merely occupies such a role, and
may do so “irresolutely,” without commitment. Being a father authentically does
not necessarily make me a better father, but what it means to be a
father has become explicitly my concern. It is here that existentialism
locates the singularity of existence and identifies what is irreducible in the
first-person stance. At the same time, authenticity does not hold out some
specific way of life as a norm; that is, it does not distinguish between the
projects that I might choose. Instead, it governs the manner in which I am
engaged in such projects—either as “my own” or as “what one does,”
transparently or opaquely.
Thus existentialism's focus on
authenticity leads to a distinctive stance toward ethics and value-theory
generally. The possibility of authenticity is a mark of my freedom, and
it is through freedom that existentialism approaches questions of value,
leading to many of its most recognizable doctrines.
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, are distinctive marks of the existentialist
tradition. In value theory, existentialists tend to emphasize the
conventionality or groundlessness of values, their “ideality,” the fact that
they arise entirely through the projects of human beings against the background
of an otherwise meaningless and indifferent world. Existential moral psychology
emphasizes human freedom and focuses on the sources of mendacity,
self-deception, and hypocricy in moral consciousness. The familiar existential
themes of anxiety, nothingness, and the absurd must be understood in this
context. At the same time, there is deep concern to foster an authentic stance
toward the human, groundless, values without which no project is possible, a
concern that gets expressed in the notions of “engagement” and “commitment.”[14]
As a predicate of existence, the
concept of freedom is not initially established on the basis of arguments
against determinism; nor is it, in Kantian fashion, taken simply as a given of
practical self-consciousness. Rather, it is located in the breakdown of
direct practical activity. The “evidence” of freedom is a matter neither of
theoretical nor of practical consciousness but arises from the
self-understanding that accompanies a certain mood into which I may
fall, namely, anxiety (Angst, angoisse). Both Heidegger and
Sartre believe that phenomenological analysis of the kind of intentionality
that belongs to moods does not merely register a passing modification of the
psyche but reveals fundamental aspects of the self. Fear, for instance, reveals
some region of the world as threatening, some element in it as a threat, and
myself as vulnerable. In anxiety, as in fear, I grasp myself as threatened or
as vulnerable; but unlike fear, anxiety has no direct object, there is nothing
in the world that is threatening. This is because anxiety pulls me altogether
out of the circuit of those projects thanks to which things are there for me in
meaningful ways; I can no longer “gear into” the world. And with this collapse
of my practical immersion in roles and projects, I also lose the basic sense of
who I am that is provided by these roles. In thus robbing me of the possibility
of practical self-identification, anxiety teaches me that I do not coincide
with anything that I factically am. Further, since the identity bound up with
such roles and practices is always typical and public, the collapse of this
identity reveals an ultimately first-personal aspect of myself that is
irreducible to das Man. As Heidegger puts it, anxiety testifies to a
kind of “existential solipsism.” It is this reluctant, because disorienting and
dispossessing, retreat into myself in anxiety that yields the existential
figure of the outsider, the isolated one who “sees through” the phoniness of
those who, unaware of what the breakdown of anxiety portends, live their lives
complacently identifying with their roles as though these roles thoroughly
defined them. While this sort of stance may be easy to ridicule as adolescent
self-absorption, it is also solidly supported by the phenomenology (or moral
psychology) of first-person experience.
The experience of anxiety also
yields the existential theme of the absurd, a version of what was
previously introduced as alienation from the world (see the section on Alienation
above). So long as I am gearing into the world practically, in a seamless and
absorbed way, things present themselves as meaningfully co-ordinated with the
projects in which I am engaged; they show me the face that is relevant to what
I am doing. But the connection between these meanings and my projects is not
itself something that I experience. Rather, the hammer's usefulness, its value
as a hammer, appears simply to belong to it in the same way that its weight or
color does. So long as I am practically engaged, in short, all things appear to
have reasons for being, and I, correlatively, experience myself as fully at
home in the world. The world has an order that is largely transparent to me
(even its mysteries are grasped simply as something for which there are reasons
that are there “for others,” for “experts,” merely beyond my limited horizon).
In the mood of anxiety, however, it is just this character that fades from the
world. Because I am no longer practically engaged, the meaning that had
previously inhabited the thing as the density of its being now stares back at
me as a mere name, as something I “know” but which no longer claims me.
As when one repeats a word until it loses meaning, anxiety undermines the
taken-for-granted sense of things. They become absurd. Things do not
disappear, but all that remains of them is the blank recognition that
they are—an experience that informs a central scene in Sartre's novel Nausea.
As Roquentin sits in a park, the root of a tree loses its character of
familiarity until he is overcome by nausea at its utterly alien character, its
being en soi. While such an experience is no more genuine than my
practical, engaged experience of a world of meaning, it is no less
genuine either. An existential account of meaning and value must recognize both
possibilities (and their intermediaries). To do so is to acknowledge a certain
absurdity to existence: though reason and value have a foothold in the world
(they are not, after all, my arbitrary invention), they nevertheless lack any
ultimate foundation. Values are not intrinsic to being, and at some point
reasons give out.[15]
Another term for the groundlessness
of the world of meaning is “nothingness.” Heidegger introduced this term to
indicate the kind of self- and world-understanding that emerges in anxiety:
because my practical identity is constituted by the practices I engage in, when
these collapse I “am” not anything. In a manner of speaking I am thus brought
face-to-face with my own finitude, my “death” as the possibility in which I am
no longer able to be anything. This experience of my own death, or
“nothingness,” in anxiety can act as a spur to authenticity: I come to see that
I “am” not anything but must “make myself be” through my choice. In commiting
myself in the face of death—that is, aware of the nothingness of my identity if
not supported by me right up to the end—the roles that I have hitherto
thoughtlessly engaged in as one does now become something that I myself own up
to, become responsible for. Heidegger termed this mode of
self-awareness—awareness of the ultimate nothingness of my practical
identity—“freedom,” and Sartre developed this existential concept of freedom in
rich detail. This is not to say that Heidegger's and Sartre's views on freedom
are identical. Heidegger, for instance, will emphasize that freedom is always
“thrown” into an historical situation from which it draws its possibilities,
while Sartre (who is equally aware of the “facticity” of our choices) will
emphasize that such “possibilities” nevertheless underdetermine choice. But the
theory of radical freedom that Sartre develops is nevertheless directly rooted
in Heidegger's account of the nothingness of my practical identity.
Sartre (1992:70) argues that anxiety
provides a lucid experience of that freedom which, though often concealed,
characterizes human existence as such. For him, freedom is the dislocation of
consciousness from its object, the fundamental “nihilation” or negation by
means of which consciousness can grasp its object without losing itself in it:
to be conscious of something is to be conscious of not being it, a “not”
that arises in the very structure of consciousness as being for-itself. Because
“nothingness” (or nihilation) is just what consciousness is, there can be no
objects in consciousness, but only objects for consciousness.[16]
This means that consciousness is radically free, since its structure precludes
that it either contain or be acted on by things. For instance,
because it is not thing-like, consciousness is free with regard to its own
prior states. Motives, instincts, psychic forces, and the like cannot be
understood as inhabitants of consciousness that might infect freedom from
within, inducing one to act in ways for which one is not responsible; rather,
they can exist only for consciousness as matters of choice. I must
either reject their claims or avow them. For Sartre, the ontological freedom of
existence entails that determinism is an excuse before it is a theory:
though through its structure of nihilation consciousness escapes that which
would define it—including its own past choices and behavior—there are times
when I may wish to deny my freedom. Thus I may attempt to constitute these
aspects of my being as objective “forces” which hold sway over me in the manner
of relations between things. This is to adopt the third-person stance on
myself, in which what is originally structured in terms of freedom appears as a
causal property of myself. I can try to look upon myself as the Other does, but
as an excuse this flight from freedom is shown to fail, according to Sartre, in
the experience of anguish.
For instance, Sartre writes of a
gambler who, after losing all and fearing for himself and his family, retreats
to the reflective behavior of resolving never to gamble again. This motive thus
enters into his facticity as a choice he has made; and, as long as he retains
his fear, his living sense of himself as being threatened, it may appear to him
that this resolve actually has causal force in keeping him from gambling.
However, one evening he confronts the gaming tables and is overcome with
anguish at the recognition that his resolve, while still “there,” retains none
of its power: it is an object for consciousness but is not (and never
could have been) something in consciousness that was determining his
actions. In order for it to influence his behavior he has to avow it afresh,
but this is just what he cannot do; indeed, just this is what he hoped the
original resolve would spare him from having to do. He will have to “remake”
the self who was in the original situation of fear and threat. At this point,
perhaps, he will try to relieve himself of freedom by giving in to the urge to
gamble and chalking it up to “deeper” motives that overcame the initial
resolve, problems from his childhood perhaps. But anguish can recur with regard
to this strategy as well—for instance, if he needs a loan to continue gambling
and must convince someone that he is “as good as his word.” The possibilities
for self-deception in such cases are endless.
As Sartre points out in great
detail, anguish, as the consciousness of freedom, is not something that human
beings welcome; rather, we seek stability, identity, and adopt the language of
freedom only when it suits us: those acts are considered by me to be my free acts
which exactly match the self I want others to take me to be. We are “condemned
to be free,” which means that we can never simply be who we are but are
separated from ourselves by the nothingness of having perpetually to re-choose,
or re-commit, ourselves to what we do. Characteristic of the existentialist
outlook is the idea that we spend much of lives devising strategies for denying
or evading the anguish of freedom. One of these strategies is “bad faith.”
Another is the appeal to values.
The idea that freedom is the origin
of value—where freedom is defined not in terms of acting rationally (Kant) but
rather existentially, as choice and transcendence—is the idea perhaps most
closely associated with existentialism. So influential was this general outlook
on value that Karl-Otto Apel (1973:235) came to speak of a kind of “official
complementarity of existentialism and scientism” in Western philosophy,
according to which what can be justified rationally falls under the “value-free
objectivism of science” while all other validity claims become matters for an
“existential subjectivism of religious faith and ethical decisions.” Positivism
attempted to provide a theory of “cognitive meaning” based on what it took to
be the inner logic of scientific thought, and it relegated questions of value
to cognitive meaninglessness, reducing them to issues of emotive response and
subjective preference. While it does not explain evaluative language solely as
a function of affective attitudes, existential thought, like positivism, denies
that values can be grounded in being—that is, that they can become the theme of
a scientific investigation capable of distinguishing true (or valid) from false
values.[17]
In this regard Sartre speaks of the “ideality” of values, by which he means not
that they have some sort of timeless validity but that they have no real
authority and cannot be used to underwrite or justify my behavior. For Sartre,
“values derive their meaning from an original projection of myself which stands
as my choice of myself in the world.” But if that is so, then I cannot, without
circularity, appeal to values in order to justify this very choice: “I make my
decision concerning them—without justification and without excuse” (Sartre
1992:78). This so-called “decisionism” has been a hotly contested legacy of
existentialism and deserves a closer look here.
How is it that values are supposed
to be grounded in freedom? By “value” Sartre means those aspects of my
experience that do not merely causally effectuate something but rather make a claim
on me: I do not just see the homeless person but encounter him as “to be
helped”; I do not just hear the other's voice but register “a question to be
answered honestly”; I do not simply happen to sit quietly in Church but “attend
reverently”; I do not merely hear the alarm clock but am “summoned to get up.”
Values, then, as Sartre writes, appear with the character of demands and
as such they “lay claim to a foundation” or justification (Sartre 1992:76). Why
ought I help the homeless, answer honestly, sit reverently, or get up?
Sartre does not claim that there is no answer to these questions but only that
the answer depends, finally, on my choice of “myself” which cannot in turn be
justfied by appeal to a value. As he puts it, “value derives its being from its
exigency and not its exigency from its being.” The exigency of value cannot be
grounded in being itself, since it would thereby lose its character as an
ought; it would “cease even to be value” since it would have the kind of
exigency (contrary to freedom) possessed by a mere cause. Thus, against
then-current value-theoretical intuitionism, Sartre denies that value can
“deliver itself to a contemplative intuition which would apprehend it as being
value and thereby would derive from it its right over my freedom.” Instead, “it
can be revealed only to an active freedom which makes it exist as a
value by the sole fact of recognizing it as such” (Sartre 1992:76).
For instance, I do not grasp the
exigency of the alarm clock (its character as a demand) in a kind of
disinterested perception but only in the very act of responding to it, of
getting up. If I fail to get up the alarm has, to that very extent, lost its
exigency. Why must I get up? At this point I may attempt to justify its
demand by appeal to other elements of the situation with which the alarm is
bound up: I must get up because I must go to work. From this point of view the
alarm's demand appears—and is—justified, and such justification will
often suffice to get me going again. But the question of the foundation of
value has simply been displaced: now it is my job that, in my active
engagement, takes on the unquestioned exigency of a demand or value. But it too
derives its being as a value from its exigency—that is, from my unreflective engagement
in the overall practice of going to work. Ought I go to work? Why not be
“irresponsible”? If a man's got to eat, why not rather take up a life of crime?
If these questions have answers that are themselves exigent it can only be
because, at a still deeper level, I am engaged as having chosen myself as a
person of a certain sort: respectable, responsible. From within that
choice there is an answer of what I ought to do, but outside that choice there
is none—why should I be respectable, law-abiding?—for it is only because some
choice has been made that anything at all can appear as compelling, as making a
claim on me. Only if I am at some level engaged do values (and so
justification in terms of them) appear at all. The more I pull out of
engagement toward reflection on and questioning of my situation, the more I am
threatened by ethical anguish—“which is the recognition of the ideality of
values” (Sartre 1992:76). And, as with all anguish, I do not escape this
situation by discovering the true order of values but by plunging back into
action. If the idea that values are without foundation in being can be
understood as a form of nihilism, the existential response to this condition of
the modern world is to point out that meaning, value, is not first of all a
matter of contemplative theory but a consequence of engagement and commitment.
Thus value judgments can be
justified, but only relative to some concrete and specific project. The
“pattern of behavior” of the typical bourgeois defines the meaning of “respectability”
(Sartre 1992:77), and so it is true of some particular bit of behavior that it
is either respectable or not. For this reason I can be in error about what I
ought to do. It may be that something that appears exigent during the course of
my unreflective engagement in the world is something that I ought not to give
in to. If, thanks to my commitment to the Resistance, a given official appears
to me as to be shot, I might nevertheless be wrong to shoot him—if, for
instance, the official was not who I thought he was, or if killing him would in
fact prove counter-productive given my longer-term goals. Sartre's fictional
works are full of explorations of moral psychology of this sort. But I cannot
extend these “hypothetical” justifications to a point where some purely
theoretical consideration of my obligations—whether derived from the will of
God, from Reason, or from the situation itself—could underwrite my freedom in
such a way as to relieve it of responsibility. For in order for such
considerations to count I would have to make myself the sort of person
for whom God's will, abstract Reason, or the current situation is decisive.
For existentialists like Sartre, then, I am “the one who finally makes values
exist in order to determine [my] actions by their demands.”[18]
Commitment—or “engagement”—is thus
ultimately the basis for an authentically meaningful life, that is, one that
answers to the existential condition of being human and does not flee that
condition by appeal to an abstract system of reason or divine will. Yet though
I alone can commit myself to some way of life, some project, I am never alone
when I do so; nor do I do so in a social, historical, or political vaccuum. If
transcendence represents my radical freedom to define myself, facticity—that
other aspect of my being—represents the situated character of this
self-making. Because freedom as transcendence undermines the idea of a stable,
timeless system of moral norms, it is little wonder that existential
philosophers devoted scant energy to questions of normative moral theory.
However, because this freedom is always socially (and thereby historically)
situated, it is equally unsurprising that their writings are greatly concerned
with how our choices and commitments are concretely contextualized in terms of
political struggles and historical reality.
For the existentialists engagement
is the source of meaning and value; in choosing myself I in a certain sense
make my world. On the other hand, I always choose myself in a context where
there are others doing the same thing, and in a world that has always already
been there. In short, my acting is situated, both socially and historically.
Thus, in choosing myself in the first-person singular, I am also choosing in
such a way that a first-person plural, a “we,” is simultaneously
constituted. Such choices make up the domain of social reality: they fit
into a pre-determined context of roles and practices that go largely
unquestioned and may be thought of as a kind of collective identity. In social
action my identity takes shape against a background (the collective identity of
the social formation) that remains fixed. On the other hand, it can happen that
my choice puts this social formation or collective identity itself into
question: who I am to be is thus inseperable from the question of who we
are to be. Here the first-person plural is itself the issue, and the action
that results from such choices constitutes the field of the political.
If authenticity is the category by
which I am able to think about what it means to “exist,” then, the account of
authenticity cannot neglect the social, historical, and political aspects of
that existence. Thus it is not merely because twentieth-century existentialism
flourished at a time when European history appeared to collapse and political
affairs loomed especially large that existential philosophers devoted much
attention to these matters; rather, the demand for an account of the
“situation” stems from the very character of existence itself, which, unlike
the classical “rational subject,” is what it is only in relation to its “time.”
This is not to say, however, that existential philosophers are unanimous in
their account of the importance of historical factors or in their estimation of
the political in relation to other aspects of existence. Emmanuel Levinas, for
example, whose early work belonged within the orbit of existential philosophy,
opposed to the “horizontal” temporality of political history a “vertical” or
eschatological temporality that radically challenged all historical meaning,
while Sartre, in contrast, produced a version of Marxist historical materialism
in which existentialism itself became a mere “ideology.” But we cannot stop to
examine all such differences here. Instead, we shall look at the positions of
Heidegger and Sartre, who provide opposing examples of how an authentic
relation to history and politics can be understood.
For Heidegger, to exist is to be
historical. This does not mean that one simply finds oneself at a particular
moment in history, conceived as a linear series of events. Rather, it means
that selfhood has a peculiar temporal structure that is the origin of
that “history” which subsequently comes to be narrated in terms of a series of
events. Existential temporality is not a sequence of instants but instead a
unified structure in which the “future” (that is, the possibility aimed at in
my project) recollects the “past” (that is, what no longer needs to be done,
the completed) so as to give meaning to the “present” (that is, the things that
take on significance in light of what currently needs doing). To act,
therefore, is, in Heidegger's terms, to “historize” (geschehen), to
constitute something like a narrative unity, with beginning, middle, and end,
that does not so much take place in time as provides the condition
for linear time. To exist “between birth and death,” then, is not merely to be
present in each of a discrete series of temporal instants but to consitute
oneself in the unity of a history, and authentic existence is thus one
in which the projects that give shape to existence are ones to which I commit
myself in light of this history. Though it belongs to, and defines, a
“moment,” choice cannot be simply “of the moment”; to be authentic I must
understand my choice in light of the potential wholeness of my
existence.
That this choice has a political
dimension stems from the fact that existence is always being-with-others.
Though authenticity arises on the basis of my being alienated, in anxiety, from
the claims made by norms belonging to the everyday life of das Man, any
concrete commitment that I make in the movement to recover myself will enlist
those norms in two ways. First, what I commit myself to will always be
derived from some “possibility of Dasein that has been there” (Heidegger
1962:438): I cannot make my identity from whole cloth; I will always understand
myself in terms of some way of existing that has been handed down within my
tradition.[19]
I “choose my hero” (Heidegger 1962:437) by, for instance, committing myself to
a philosophical life, which I understand on the model of Socrates, or to a
religious life, which I understand on the model of St. Francis. The point is
that I must understand myself in terms of something, and these
possibilities for understanding come from the historical heritage and the norms
that belong to it. Heidegger thinks of this historical dimension as a kind of
“fate” (Schicksal): not something inevitable that controls my choice but
something that, inherited from my historical situation, claims me, holds
a kind of authority for me.
The second way in which the everyday
norms of das Man are enlisted in authentic choice stems from the fact
that when I commit myself to my “fate” I do so “in and with my
‘generation’” (Heidegger 1962:436). The idea here seems roughly to be this: To
opt for a way of going on is to affirm the norms that belong to it; and because
of the nature of normativity (rules) it is not possible to affirm norms that
would hold only for me. There is a kind of publicity and scope in
the normative such that, when I choose, I establish a standard for others as
well. Similarly, Heidegger holds that the sociality of my historizing restricts
what can be a genuine “fate” or choice for me. Acting is always with
others—more specifically, with a “community” or a “people” (Volk)—and
together this “co-historizing” responds to a “destiny” (Geschick) which
has guided our fates in advance (Heidegger 1962:436). Not everything is really
possible for us, and an authentic choice must strive to respond to the claim
that history makes on the people to whom one belongs, to seize its “destiny.”
Along this communitarian axis, then, existential historicality can open out
onto the question of politics: who are “we” to be?
Heidegger suggests that it was this
concept of historicality that underwrote his own concrete political engagement
during the period of National Socialism in Germany. Disgusted with the
political situation in Weimar Germany and characterizing it as especially
irresolute or inauthentic, Heidegger looked upon Hitler's movement as a way of
recalling the German people back to their “ownmost” possibility—i.e., a way for
Germany to constitute itself authentically as an alternative to the political
models of Russia and the United States. Heidegger's choice to intervene in
university politics at this time was thus both a choice of himself—in which he
chose his hero: Plato's “philosopher-king” (see Arendt 1978)—and a choice for his
“generation.” Much is controversial about Heidegger's engagement for National
Socialism (not least whether he drew the appropriate consequences from his own
concept of authenticity), but it provides a clear example of a kind of
existential politics that depends on an ability to “tell time”—that is, to
sense the imperatives of one's factic historical situation. Heidegger later
became very suspicious of this sort of existential politics. Indeed, for the
idea of authenticity as resolute commitment he substituted the idea of a
“letting-be” (Gelassenheit) and for engagement the stance of “waiting.”
He came to believe that the problems that face us (notably, the dominance of
technological ways of thinking) have roots that lie deeper than can be
addressed through politics directly. He thus famously denied that democracy was
sufficient to deal with the political crisis posed by technology, asserting
that “only a god can save us” (Heidegger 1981:55, 57). But even here, in
keeping with the existential notion of historicity, Heidegger's recommendations
turn on a reading of history, of the meaning of our time.
A very different reading, and a very
different recommendation, can be found in the work of Sartre. The basis for
Sartre's reading of history, and his politics, was laid in that section of Being
and Nothingness that describes the birth of the social in the “Look” of the
other. In making me an object for his projects, the other alienates me from
myself, displaces me from the subject position (the position from which the
world is defined in its meaning and value) and constitutes me as
something. Concretely, what I am constituted “as” is a function of the other's
project and not something that I can make myself be. I am constituted as a
“Frenchman” in and through the hostility emanating from that German; I am
constituted as a “man” in the resentment of that woman; I am constituted as a
“Jew” on the basis of the other's anti-semitism; and so on. This sets up a
dimension of my being that I can neither control nor disavow, and my only
recourse is to wrench myself away from the other in an attempt to restore
myself to the subject-position. For this reason, on Sartre's model, social
reality is in perpetual conflict—an Hegelian dialectic in which, for
ontological reasons, no state of mutual recognition can ever be achieved. The
“we”—the political subject—is always contested, conflicted, unstable.
But this instability does have a
certain structure, one which Sartre, steeped in the Marxism of inter-war French
thought (Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite), explored in terms of a certain
historical materialism. For social relations take place not only between human
beings but also within institutions that have developed historically and that
enshrine relations of power and domination. Thus the struggle for who will take
the subject position is not carried out on equal terms. As Simone de Beauvoir
demonstrated in detail in her book, The Second Sex, the historical and
institutional place of women is defined in such a way that they are consigned
to a kind of permanent “object” status—they are the “second” sex since social
norms are defined in male terms. This being so, a woman's struggle to develop
self-defining projects is constrained by a permanent institutional “Look” that
already defines her as “woman,” whereas a man need not operate under
constraints of gender: he feels himself to be simply “human,” pure
subjectivity. Employing similar insights in reflection on the situations of
ethnic and economic oppression, Sartre sought a way to derive political
imperatives in the face of the groundlessness of moral values entailed by his view
of the ideality of values.
At first, Sartre argued that there
was one value—namely freedom itself—that did have a kind of universal
authority. To commit oneself to anything is also always to commit oneself to
the value of freedom. In “Existentialism is a Humanism” Sartre tried to
establish this by way of a kind of transcendental argument, but he soon gave up
that strategy and pursued the more modest one of claiming that the writer
must always engage “on the side of freedom.” According to the theory of “engaged
literature” expounded in What is Literature?, in creating a literary
world the author is always acting either to imagine paths toward overcoming
concrete unfreedoms such as racism and capitalist exploitation, or else closing
them off. In the latter case, he is contradicting himself, since the very idea
of writing presupposes the freedom of the reader, and that means, in principle,
the whole of the reading public. Whatever the merits of this argument, it does
suggest the political value to which Sartre remained committed throughout his
life: the value of freedom as self-making.
This commitment finally led Sartre
to hold that existentialism itself was only an “ideological” moment within
Marxism, which he termed “the one philosophy of our time which we cannot go
beyond” (Sartre 1968:xxxiv). As this statement suggests, Sartre's embrace of
Marxism was a function of his sense of history as the factic situation in which
the project of self-making takes place. Because existing is self-making
(action), philosophy—including existential philosophy—cannot be understood as a
disinterested theorizing about timeless essences but is always already a form
of engagement, a diagnosis of the past and a projection of norms appropriate to
a different future in light of which the present takes on significance. It
therefore always arises from the historical-political situation and is a way of
intervening in it. Marxism, like existentialism, makes this necessarily
practical orientation of philosophy explicit.
From the beginning existentialism
saw itself in this activist way (and this provided the basis for the most
serious disagreements among French existentialists such as Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, many of which were fought out in the pages of the
journal founded by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Les Temps modernes). But
the later Sartre came to hold that a philosophy of self-making could not
content itself with highlighting the situation of individual choice; an
authentic political identity could only emerge from a theory that situated
such choice in a practically oriented analysis of its concrete situation. Thus
it appeard to him that the “ideology of existence” was itself merely an
alienated form of the deeper analysis of social and historical reality provided
by Marx's dialectical approach. In focusing on the most important aspects of
the material condition in which the existential project of self-making takes
place—namely, economic relations under conditions of scarcity—Marx's critique
of capital offered a set of considerations that no “philosophy of freedom”
could ignore, considerations that would serve to orient political engagement
until such time as “there will exist for everyone a margin of real
freedom beyond the production of life” (Sartre 1968:34). Marxism is unsurpassable,
therefore, because it is the most lucid theory of our alienated situation of
concrete unfreedom, oriented toward the practical-political overcoming of that
unfreedom.
Sartre's relation to orthodox
Marxism was marked by tension, however, since he held that existing Marxism had
abandoned the promise of its dialectical approach to social reality in favor of
a dogmatic “apriorism” that subsumed historical reality under a blanket of
lifeless abstractions. He thus undertook his Critique of Dialectical Reason
to restore the promise of Marxism by reconceiving its concept of praxis
in terms of the existential notion of project. What had become a rigid
economic determinism would be restored to dialectical fluidity by recalling the
existential doctrine of self-making: it is true that man is “made” by history,
but at the same time he is making that very history. This attempt to “reconquer
man within Marxism” (Sartre 1968:83)—i.e., to develop a method which would
preserve the concrete details of human reality as lived experience—was
not well received by orthodox Marxists. Sartre's fascination with the details
of Flaubert's life, or the life of Baudelaire, smacked too much of “bourgeois
idealism.” But we see here how Sartre's politics, like Heidegger's, derived
from his concept of history: there are no “iron-clad laws” that make the
overthrow of capitalism the inevitable outcome of economic forces; there are
only men in situation who make history as they are made by it. Dialectical
materialism is the unsurpassable philosophy of those who choose, who commit
themselves to, the value of freedom. The political claim that Marxism has on
us, then, would rest upon the ideological enclave within it: authentic
existence as choice.
Authentic existence thus has an
historical, political dimension; all choice will be attentive to history in the
sense of contextualizing itself in some temporally narrative understanding of
its place. But even here it must be admitted that what makes existence
authentic is not the “correctness” of the narrative understanding it adopts.
Authenticity does not depend on some particular substantive view of
history, some particular theory or empirical story. From this point of view,
the substantive “histories” adopted by existential thinkers as different as
Heidegger and Sartre should perhaps be read less as scientific accounts,
defensible in third-person terms, than as articulations of the historical
situation from the perspective of what that situation is taken to demand, given
the engaged commitment of their authors. They stand, in other words, less as justifications
for their authors' existential and political commitments than as themselves a form
of politics: invitations to others to see things as the author sees them, so
that the author's commitment to going on a certain way will come to be shared.
As a cultural movement,
existentialism belongs to the past. As a philosophical inquiry that introduced
a new norm, authenticity, for understanding what it means to be human—a norm tied
to distinctive, post-Cartesian concept of the self as practical, embodied,
being-in-the-world—existentialism has continued to play an important role in
contemporary thought, in both the continental and analytic traditions. The
Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, as well as societies
devoted to Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, Beauvoir, and other
existential philosophers, provide a forum for ongoing work—both of a
historical, scholarly nature and of more systematic focus—that derives from
classical existentialism, often bringing it into confrontation with more recent
movements such as structuralism, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and feminism. In
the area of gender studies Judith Butler (1990) draws importantly on
existential sources, as does Lewis Gordon (1995) in the area of race theory.
Interest in a narrative conception of self-identity—for instance, in the work
of Charles Taylor (1999), Paul Ricoeur, David Carr (1986), or Charles
Guignon—has its roots in the existential revision of Hegelian notions of
temporality and its critique of rationalism. Hubert Dreyfus (1979) developed an
influential criticism of the Artificial Intelligence program drawing
essentially upon the existentialist idea, found especially in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty,
that the human world, the world of meaning, must be understood first of all as
a function of our embodied practices and cannot be represented as a logically
structured system of representations. Calling for a “new existentialism,” John
Haugeland (1998) has explored the role of existential commitment in scientific
practices as truth-tracking practices. In a series of books, Michael Gelven
(1990, 1997) has reflected upon the distinctions between existential, moral,
and epistemological or logical dimensions of experience, showing how the
standards appropriate to each intertwine, without reducing to any single one. A
revival of interest in moral psychology finds many writers who are taking up
the question of self-identity and responsibility in ways that recall the
existential themes of self-making and choice—for instance, Christine Korsgaard
(1996) appeals crucially to notions of “self-creation” and “practical
identity”; Richard Moran (2001) emphasizes the connection between self-avowal
and the first-person perspective in a way that derives in part from Sartre; and
Thomas Nagel has followed the existentialist line in connecting meaning to the
consciousness of death. Even if such writers tend to proceed with more
confidence in the touchstone of rationality than did the classical
existentialists, their work operates on the terrain opened up by the earlier
thinkers. In addition, after years of being out of fashion in France,
existential motifs have once again become prominent in the work of leading thinkers.
Foucault's embrace of a certain concept of freedom, and his exploration of the
“care of the self,” recall debates within existentialism, as does Derrida's
recent work on religion without God and his reflections on the concepts of
death, choice, and responsibility. In very different ways, the books by Cooper
(1999) and Alan Schrift (1995) suggest that a re-appraisal of the legacy of
existentialism is an important agenda item of contemporary philosophy. In some
sense, existentialism's very notoriety as a cultural movement may have impeded
its serious philosophical reception. It may be that what we have most to learn
from existentialism still lies before us.
The bibliography is divided into two
sections; taken together, they provide a representative sample of
existentialist writing. The first includes books that are cited in the body of
the article. The second contains supplementary reading, including works that
have been mentioned in the article, selected works by some of the figures
mentioned in the first paragraph of the article, certain classical readings in
existentialism, and more recent studies of relevance to the issues discussed.
The bibliography is, somewhat arbitrarily, limited to works in English, and no
attempt at comprehensiveness has been made. For detailed bibliographies of the
major existentialists, including critical studies, the reader is referred to
the entries devoted to the individual philosophers. I invite readers to suggest
new and noteworthy sources for inclusion here.
- Apel, K.-O., 1973. “The Apriori of the Communication
Community and the Foundation of Ethics,” in Towards a Transformation of
Philosophy. Tr. Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London: Routledge.
- Arendt, H., 1978. “Heidegger at Eighty,” in Heidegger
and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Michael Murray. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
- Beauvoir, S., 1989. The Second Sex (1949). Tr.
H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books.
- Butler, J., 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
- Carr, D., 1986. Time, Narrative, and History,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Cooper, D., 1999. Existentialism, Oxford:
Blackwell.
- Crowell, S., 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space
of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press.
- Crowell, S., 2004. “Authentic Historicality,” in Space,
Time, and Culture. Ed. David Carr and Cheung Chan-Fai. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
- Dreyfus, H., 1979. What Computers Can't Do: The
Limits of Artificial Intelligence, New York: Harper Colophon.
- Dreyfus, H., and J. Haugeland, 1978. “Husserl and
Heidegger: Philosophy's Last Stand,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy.
Ed. Michael Murray. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Fackenheim, E., 1961. Metaphysics and Historicity,
Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.
- Fell, J., 1979. Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on
Being and Place, New York: Columbia University Press.
- Gordon, L., 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,
Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
- Gelven, M., 1997. The Risk of Being: What is Means
to Be Good and Bad, University Park: Penn State Press.
- Gelven, M., 1990. Truth and Existence: A
Philosophical Inquiry, University Park: Penn State Press.
- Guignon, C., 1993. “Authenticity, Moral Values, and
Psychotherapy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge
UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Hannay, A., 1982. Kierkegaard, London:
Routledge.
- Haugeland, J., 1998. Having Thought: Essays in the
Metaphysics of Mind, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
- Heidegger, M., 1962. Being and Time. Tr. John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.
- Heidegger, M., 1985. History of the Concept of Time:
Prolegomena. Tr. Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
- Heidegger, M., 1998. “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks.
Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Heidegger, M., 1981. “'Only a God Can Save Us': The Spiegel
Interview (1966),” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Ed.
Thomas Sheehan. Chicago: Precedent Publishing.
- Jaspers, K., 1968. Reason and Existenz, New
York: Noonday Press.
- Kaufmann, W., 1968. Existentialism from Dostoevsky
to Sartre, Cleveland: Meridian Books.
- Korsgaard, C., 1996. The Sources of Normativity,
Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
- MacIntyre, A., 1967. “Existentialism,” in The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. III. Ed. Paul Edwards. New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company.
- Marcel, G., 1968. The Philosophy of Existentialism,
New York: Citadel Press.
- Merleau-Ponty, M., 1962. Phenomenology of Perception.
Tr. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Moran, R., 2001. Authority and Estrangement: An
Essay on Self Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Natanson, M., 1968. Literature, Philosophy, and the
Social Sciences, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
- Nehamas, A., 1998. The Art of Living: Socratic
Reflections from Plato to Foucault, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
- Ricoeur, P., 1992. Oneself as Another. Tr.
Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Sartre, J.-P., 1992. Being and Nothingness. Tr.
Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.
- Sartre, J.-P., 1968. Search for a Method. Tr.
Hazel Barnes. New York: Vintage Books.
- Schrift, A., 1995. Nietzsche's French Legacy: A
Genealogy of Poststructuralism, New York: Routledge.
- Spiegelberg, H., 1984. The Phenomenological
Movement, 3rd ed. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
- Taylor, C., 1985. “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Philosophical
Papers I: Human Agency and Language. Cambridge UK: Cambridge
University Press.
- Taylor, C., 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of
the Modern Identity, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
- Warnock, M., 1967. Existentialist Ethics,
London: Macmillan and Co, Ltd.
- Zaner, R., and D. Ihde (eds.), 1973. Phenomenology
and Existentialism, New York: Capricorn Books
- Arendt, H., 1998. The Human Condition (1958).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Aron, R., 1969. Marxism and the Existentialists,
New York: Harper and Row.
- Barnes, H., 1967. An Existentialist Ethics, New
York: Knopf.
- Barrett, W., 1962. Irrational Man: A Study in
Existential Philosophy (1958), Garden City: Doubleday.
- Buber, M., 1978. Between Man and Man. Tr. Ronald
Gregor Smith. New York: Macmillan.
- Buber, M., 1970. I and Thou. Tr. Walter
Kaufmann. New York: Scribner.
- Bultmann, R., 1987. Faith and Understanding. Tr.
Louise Pettibone Smith. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
- Bultmann, R., 1957. History and Eschatology,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Busch, T., 1999. Circulating Being: From Embodiment
to Incorporation (Essays on Late Existentialism), New York: Fordham
University Press.
- Camus, A., 1955. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other
Essays. Tr. Justin O'Brien. New York: Knopf.
- Camus, A., 1988. The Stranger. Tr. Matthew Ward.
New York: Knopf.
- Collins, J., 1952. The Existentialists: A Critical
Study, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.
- Dostoevsky, F., 1976. The Brothers Karamazov: The
Constance Garnett translation revised by Ralph E. Matlaw. New York:
Norton.
- Earnshaw, S., 2006. Existentialism: A Guide for the
Perplexed, London: Continuum.
- Flynn, T., 2006. Existentialism: A Very Short
Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Flynn, T., 1997. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical
Reason, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Gordon, H., 1999. Dictionary of Existentialism,
New York: Greenwood Press.
- Gordon, L., 1997. Existence in Black: An Anthology
of Black Existential Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
- Gordon, L., 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding
Africana Existential Thought, London: Routledge.
- Grene, M., 1948. Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Guignon, C., 2003. The Existentialists: Critical
Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, New York:
Rowman and Littlefield.
- Guignon, C., and D. Pereboom (eds.), “Introduction: The
Legacy of Existentialism,” in Existentialism: Basic Writings.
Indianapolis: Hackett.
- Guignon, C., and D. Pereboom (eds.), Existentialism:
Basic Writings, Indianapolis: Hackett.
- Jaspers, K., 1968. Reason and Existenz. Tr.
William Earle. New York: Noonday Press.
- Judt, T., 1992. Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals
1944–1956, Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Kant, I., 1960. Religion Within the Limits of Reason
Alone. Tr. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper
& Row.
- Kierkegaard, S., 1971. Concluding Unscientific
Postscript. Tr. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
- Kierkegaard, S., 1983. Fear and Trembling. Tr.
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Kruks, S., 1990. Situation and Human Existence:
Freedom, Subjectivity, and Society, London: Unwin Hyman.
- Marcel, G., 1949. Being and Having. Tr.
Katherine Farrer. London: Westminster.
- McBride, W. (ed.), 1997. The Development and Meaning
of Twentieth Century Existentialism, New York: Garland. Publishers
- Merleau-Ponty, M., 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic.
Tr. Joseph Bien. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
- Merleau-Ponty, M., 1962. The Phenomenology of
Perception. Tr. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Natanson, M., 1986. Anonymity: A Study in the
Philosophy of Alfred Schutz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Nietzsche, F., 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals.
Tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
- Nietzsche, F., 1974. The Gay Science. Tr. Walter
Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
- Nietzsche, F., 1975. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In The
Portable Nietzsche. Tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press.
- Olafson, F., 1967. Principles and Persons: An
Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Press.
- Ortega y Gasset, J., 1985. Revolt of the Masses.
Tr. Anthony Kerrigan. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
- Poster, M., 1975. Existential Marxism in Postwar
France: From Sartre to Althusser, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
- Ricoeur, P., 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation, New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Reynolds, J., 2006. Understanding Existentialism.
London: Acumen.
- Sartre, J.-P., 1967. Baudelaire. Tr. Martin
Turnell. New York: New Directions.
- Sartre, J.-P., 1976. Critique of Dialectical Reason
I: Theory of Practical Ensembles (1960). Tr. Alan Sheridan-Smith.
London: Verso.
- Sartre, J.-P., 2007. Existentialism is a Humanism.
Tr. Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Sartre, J.-P., 1959. Nausea. Tr. Lloyd
Alexander. New York: New Directions.
- Sartre, J.-P., 1955. No Exit, and Three Other Plays.
New York: Vintage Books.
- Sartre, J.-P., 1988. What is Literature? (1948),
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
- Shestov, L., 1969. Kierkegaard and the Existential
Philosophy. Tr. Elinor Hewitt. Athens: Ohio University Press.
- Solomon, R. (ed.), 1974. Existentialism, New
York: Random House.
- Stewart, J. (ed.), 1998. The Debate Between Sartre
and Merleau-Ponty, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
- Tillich, P., 2000. The Courage to Be, New Haven:
Yale University Press.
- Unamuno, M., 1954. The Tragic Sense of Life. Tr.
J.E. Crawford Flitch. New York: Dover.
- Wahl, J., 1949. A Short History of Existentialism.
Tr. Forrest Williams and Stanley Maron. New York: Philosophical Library.
- Wild, J., 1963. The Challenge of Existentialism
(1955), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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