that came to prominence in Europe, particularly
in France, immediately after World War
II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each
human individual as distinguished from abstract
universal human qualities. Historians differ as to
antecedents. Some see an existentialist precursor
in Pascal, whose aphoristically expressed Catholic
fideism questioned the power of rationalist
thought and preferred the God of Scripture to the
abstract “God of the philosophers.” Many agree
that Kierkegaard, whose fundamentally similar
but Protestant fideism was based on a profound
unwillingness to situate either God or any individual’s
relationship with God within a systematic
philosophy, as Hegel had done, should be
considered the first modern existentialist,
though he too lived long before the term
emerged. Others find a proto-existentialist in
Nietzsche, because of the aphoristic and anti-systematic
nature of his writings, and on the literary
side, in Dostoevsky. (A number of twentiethcentury
novelists, such as Franz Kafka, have
been labeled existentialists.)
A strong existentialist strain is to be found in
certain other theist philosophers who have written
since Kierkegaard, such as Lequier, Berdyaev,
Marcel, Jaspers, and Buber, but Marcel
later decided to reject the label ‘existentialist’,
which he had previously employed. This reflects
its increasing identification with the atheistic
existentialism of Sartre, whose successes, as in
the novel Nausea, and the philosophical work
Being and Nothingness, did most to popularize the
word. A mass-audience lecture, “Existentialism
Is a Humanism,” which Sartre (to his later regret)
allowed to be published, provided the occasion
for Heidegger, whose early thought had greatly
influenced Sartre’s evolution, to take his distance
from Sartre’s existentialism, in particular for its
self-conscious concentration on human reality
over Being. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, written
in reply to a French admirer, signals an
important turn in his thinking. Nevertheless,
many historians continue to classify Heidegger as
an existentialist – quite reasonably, given his
early emphasis on existential categories and
ideas such as anxiety in the presence of death,
our sense of being “thrown” into existence, and
our temptation to choose anonymity over
authenticity in our conduct. This illustrates the
difficulty of fixing the term ‘existentialism’.
Other French thinkers of the time, all acquaintances
of Sartre’s, who are often classified as existentialists,
are Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and,
though with less reason, Merleau-Ponty.
Camus’s novels, such as The Stranger and The
Plague, are cited along with Nausea as epitomizing
the uniqueness of the existentialist antihero who
acts out of authenticity, i.e., in freedom from any
conventional expectations about what so-called
human nature (a concept rejected by Sartre) supposedly
requires in a given situation, and with a
sense of personal responsibility and absolute
lucidity that precludes the “bad faith” or lying to
oneself that characterizes most conventional
human behavior. Good scholarship prescribes
caution, however, about superimposing too
many Sartrean categories on Camus. In fact the
latter, in his brief philosophical essays, notably
The Myth of Sisyphus, distinguishes existentialist
writers and philosophers, such as Kierkegaard,
from absurdist thinkers and heroes, whom he
regards more highly, and of whom the mythical
Sisyphus (condemned eternally by the gods to
roll a huge boulder up a hill before being forced,
just before reaching the summit, to start anew) is
the epitome. Camus focuses on the concept of the
absurd, which Kierkegaard had used to characterize
the object of his religious faith (an incarnate
God). But for Camus existential absurdity lies in
the fact, as he sees it, that there is always at best
an imperfect fit between human reasoning and
its intended objects, hence an impossibility of
achieving certitude. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is,
for Camus, one more pseudo-solution to this
hard, absurdist reality.
Almost alone among those named besides
Sartre (who himself concentrated more on social
and political thought and became indebted to
Marxism in his later years), Simone de Beauvoir
(1908–86) unqualifiedly accepted the existentialist
label. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she
attempted, using categories familiar in Sartre, to
produce an existentialist ethics based on the
recognition of radical human freedom as “projected”
toward an open future, the rejection of
inauthenticity, and a condemnation of the “spirit
of seriousness” (akin to the “spirit of gravity”
criticized by Nietzsche) whereby individuals
identify themselves wholly with certain fixed
qualities, values, tenets, or prejudices. Her feminist
masterpiece, The Second Sex, relies heavily on
the distinction, part existentialist and part
Hegelian in inspiration, between a life of immanence,
or passive acceptance of the role into
which one has been socialized, and one of transcendence,
actively and freely testing one’s possibilities
with a view to redefining one’s future.
Historically, women have been consigned to the
sphere of immanence, says de Beauvoir, but in
fact a woman in the traditional sense is not something
that one is made, without appeal, but rather
something that one becomes.
The Sartrean ontology of Being and Nothingness,
according to which there are two fundamental
asymmetrical “regions of being,” being-in-itself
and being-for-itself, the latter having no definable
essence and hence, as “nothing” in itself,
serving as the ground for freedom, creativity, and
action, serves well as a theoretical framework for
an existentialist approach to human existence.
(Being and Nothingness also names a third ontological
region, being-for-others, but that may be
disregarded here.) However, it would be a mistake
to treat even Sartre’s existentialist insights,
much less those of others, as dependent on this
ontology, to which he himself made little direct
reference in his later works. Rather, it is the
implications of the common central claim that
we human beings exist without justification
(hence “absurdly”) in a world into which we are
“thrown,” condemned to assume full responsibility
for our free actions and for the very values
according to which we act, that make existentialism
a continuing philosophical challenge,
particularly to ethicists who believe right choices
to be dictated by our alleged human essence or
nature.
Keyword Search:
CAMUS,
EVIDENTIALISM,
HEIDEGGER,
KIERKEGAARD,
SARTRE.
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