existentialism a philosophical and literary movement 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.
See also CAMUS, EVIDENTIALISM , HEIDEG- GER , KIERKEGAARD , SARTR. W.L.M.