Existentialism

Nietzsche, who was not acquainted with the work of Kierkegaard, influenced subsequent existentialist thought through his criticism of traditional metaphysical and moral assumptions and through his espousal of tragic pessimism and the life-affirming individual will that opposes itself to the moral conformity of the majority. In contrast to Kierkegaard, whose attack on conventional morality led him to advocate a radically individualistic Christianity, Nietzsche proclaimed the “death of God” and went on to reject the entire Judaeo-Christian moral tradition in favour of a heroic pagan ideal.

Like Pascal and Kierkegaard, Heidegger rejected the possibility of understanding the world and humanity from the standpoint of a detached, rational spectator, such as the one advocated by his teacher, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” attempts to uncover the basic structures of human existence—such as concern and mood—in virtue of which knowledge and understanding are possible. He argues that a person’s usual understanding is dictated by the anonymous “public” or “Them”, and that individual authenticity—the prospect of which is experienced in the state of angst or anxiety—requires distancing oneself from “Them” and “resolutely” forging one’s own “projects” and view of things. This sense of potential individuality is reinforced by the sober recognition of mortality, since a person’s own death, and the way he or she faces up to it, is something that is uniquely his or her own.

Sartre first gave the term “existentialism” general currency by using it for his own philosophy and by becoming the leading figure of a distinct movement in France that became internationally influential after World War II. Sartre’s philosophy is explicitly atheistic and, at first glance, pessimistic, for he declared that human beings seek a rational basis for their lives that they are unable to achieve, so that human life is a “futile passion”. Sartre nevertheless denied the charge of pessimism, regarding his existentialism as a form of humanism: by facing up to radical freedom and responsibility, instead of hiding from them in cowardly “bad faith”, human beings are in a position to forge a new, more honest morality. In his later writings, Sartre tried to reconcile a morality of existential freedom with a Marxist analysis of society and history.

Although existentialist thought encompasses the uncompromising atheism of Nietzsche and Sartre and the agnosticism of Heidegger, its origin in the intensely religious philosophies of Pascal and Kierkegaard foreshadowed its profound influence on 20th-century theology. The 20th-century German philosopher Karl Jaspers, although he rejected explicit religious doctrines, influenced contemporary theology through his preoccupation with transcendence and the limits of human experience. The German Protestant theologians Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, the French Roman Catholic theologian Gabriel Marcel, the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev, and the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber inherited many of Kierkegaard’s concerns, especially the belief that a personal sense of authenticity and commitment is essential to religious faith.

A number of existentialist philosophers used literary forms to convey their thought, and existentialism has been as vital and as extensive a movement in literature as in philosophy. The 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky is probably the greatest existentialist literary figure. In Notes from the Underground (1864), the alienated anti-hero rages against the optimistic assumptions of rationalist humanism. The view of human nature that emerges in this and others of Dostoyevsky’s novels is that it is unpredictable and perversely self-destructive; only Christian love can save humanity from itself, but such love cannot be understood philosophically. As the character Alyosha says in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), “we must love life more than the meaning of it”.

In the 20th century, the novels of the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Kafka, such as The Trial (1925; trans. 1937) and The Castle (1926; trans. 1930), present isolated men confronting vast, elusive, menacing bureaucracies; Kafka’s themes of anxiety, guilt, and solitude reflect the influence of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. The influence of Nietzsche is also discernible in the novels of the French writer André Malraux and in the plays of Sartre. The work of the French writer Albert Camus is usually associated with existentialism because of the prominence in it of such themes as the apparent absurdity and futility of life, the indifference of the universe, and the necessity of engagement in a just cause. Existentialist themes are also reflected in the theatre of the absurd, notably in the plays of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. In the United States, the influence of existentialism on literature has been more indirect and diffuse, but traces of Kierkegaard’s thought can be found in the novels of Walker Percy and John Updike, and various existentialist themes are apparent in the work of such diverse writers as Norman Mailer, John Barth, and Arthur Miller.

For additional information on individual philosophers and writers, see biographies of those mentioned.