Existentialism (During and After the

Second World War)

• Existentialism was the most fashionable
philosophical and literary movement following
World War II.

• Actually came into existence first in the writings

of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900).

• Popularity in the aftermath of the war because it

suited the popular reaction to the War.
 Existentialists believe that:
1. Only individual things exists.
2. Abstractions and generalizations do not exists;
they are inventions of the mind in order to think
and make connections.
3. But, if we want to understand what does exists,
we have to come to terms with uniquely
individual entities.
4. Individual is supreme moral entity and it is the
personal and more subjective aspects of life
which is more important.
• The transcending values of moral consideration
(meaning its effects will be felt not only by the
individual but also society etc.), the most
important part is decision-making: it is through
the choices that we make that we create
ourselves and become ourselves.
But Kierkegard was also religious, he placed
importance on the relationship between the
individual soul to God.
• But some of his followers did not share his
belief in God.
• Two types of Existentialism: 1) Christian
existentialism and 2) Humanist existentialism.
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
 Humanist Existentialism
• Edmund Husserl argues that when one looks at
an object, a table for example, one is aware of
the object and not of oneself.
• He proposed phenomenology: philosophy that
base itself on method of examining what is
directly experienced, and should not make
unprovable assumptions about the existence of
anything else.
• What we understand and know must only be
what we have experienced.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
• Martin Heidegger studied under Husserl.
• Struggled to answer the question: What is
Existence?
• Argued that men is not separate from the world,
looking at it. We are an integral part of the world;
and our being cannot be conceived as other than
in a world of some kind.
• Therefore, Heidegger argued that the way to
determine the meaning of our existence is to
carry out a phenomenological analysis of what it
is we are aware of our own existence.
 Heidegger argues the following:
• That man’s existence at the very beginning is a social
one and our problem is becoming individuals, finding
an authentic mode of personal existence.
• We are, all the time, pressing into unknowable future
and having to make choices without any certainty
about their outcomes.
• Forever, guilty and anxious.
• Long for metaphysical ground.
• But unsure if it exists.
• Left with the feeling that our lives will be meaningless,
absurd if these do not exists at all.
Jean-Paul Sarte
• Heidegger’s ideas had an influence on Sarte.
• Jean Paul Sarte (1905-80) was a philosopher,
writer, playwright and novelist.
• Born in Paris and the World War I changed his
life as he joined the French army and was
imprisoned by the Germans.
 Sarte’s contributions:
• Dramatized the freedom of the individual.
• In a Godless world, we have to create our own
values.
• This means we are laying down ground-rules
of our own lives.
• We determine our personalities, we create
ourselves.
• Sarte asserts that existence of a person
predetermines his or her essence. Nothing
else determines him/herself.
• According to Sartre, "Man first of all exists,
encounters himself, surges up in the world -
and defines himself afterwards“ (Sarte,
Existentialism is a Humanism, 1956).
• Many people find this freedom and
responsibility too terrifying to face so they run
from it by pretending that they are bound by
already existing norms and rules : Sarte calls
this “bad faith”.
• One, Sarte says, has “total choice of oneself”
and living in accordance with it :
“commitment”.
 The Absurd: in plays and novels
• The notion of the Absurd: there is no meaning to be found
in the world beyond what meaning we give to it.
• This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or
"unfairness" of the world, which means that a bad thing
can happen to a good or bad person.
• Can lead to a tragic unexpected event in works of literature.
• Many of the literary works by Søren Kierkegaard, Samuel
Beckett, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Eugène Ionesco,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus contain descriptions of
people who encounter the absurdity of the world.
• Leads to a devastating meaninglessness, which Albert
Camus describes as providing one solution "that is suicide"
in his The Myth of Sisyphus.
 Concepts related to existentialism:
1) Authenticity
• Authentic existence is concerned with the idea
that one has to "create oneself" and then live
in accordance with this self. What is meant by
authenticity is that in acting, one should act as
oneself, not as "one" acts or as "one's genes"
or any other essence requires.
 2) The Other and The Look

• The experience of the Other involves the experience of

another free subject who inhabits the same world as a
person does. Includes two terms:
• Intersubjectivity: When one experiences someone else,
and this Other person also experiences the world (the same
world that a person experiences), only from "over there“.
• Objectivity: the world itself is constituted as objective in
that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of
the subjects.
• This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the
Look (sometimes the Gaze).
• .
• The Look tends to objectify what it sees.
• We tend to objectify another person(s) who
we see.
• As such, when one experiences oneself in the
Look (as when one knows that other people
are looking at one), one doesn't experience
oneself as nothing, but as something.
 3) Angst
• "Existential angst“ or dread, anxiety, or anguish, can be defined as
a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom
and responsibility.
• The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing
on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the
possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing
is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that
predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and
one experiences one's own freedom.
• Angst before nothing.
• The word "nothing" relates both to the (1) inherent insecurity
about the consequences of one's actions (2) to the fact that, in
experiencing one's freedom as angst, one also realizes that one will
be fully responsible for these consequences.
“The scream” (1893) by Norwegian
painter Edward Munch
 4) Despair
• Despair defined as a loss of hope.
• Particularly in a breakdown in one or more of the
defining qualities of one's self or identity. For
example, a dancer who loses breaks her leg
permanently would be in a state of despair since
she has nothing else to fall back on, nothing on
which to rely for her identity.
• But existentialist also believe that we are all
forever in a state of despair since one’s identity
depends on qualities that can crumble.
Despair (1893) by Edward Munch
 Literature and Theatre
• Literature
• Existential perspectives are also found in literature to varying degrees
since 1922.
• Jean-Paul Sartre wrote No Exit in 1944: An existentialist play that begins
with a Valet leading a man into a room that the audience soon realizes is
in hell. Eventually he is joined by two women. After their entry, the Valet
leaves and the door is shut and locked. All three expect to be tortured, but
no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize they are there to torture each
other, which they do effectively by probing each other's sins, desires, and
unpleasant memories.
• Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd, notably in
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two men divert themselves
while they wait expectantly for someone (or something) named Godot
who never arrives. They claim Godot to be an acquaintance, but in fact
hardly know him, admitting they would not recognize him if they saw him.
Samuel Beckett, once asked who or what Godot is, replied, "If I knew, I
would have said so in the play."
EXISTENTIALISM VS. STRUCTURALISM
: Contending theories
• Existentialism flourished in the crisis decades
of the twentieth century, reaching its peak
before, during, and just after the Second
World War. Its point of departure is the lived
existence of the individual, thrown into an
arbitrary ("absurd") world, and confronted
with the "anguish" and responsibility of choice
and freedom.
• Structuralism is concerned, not with individual
choice and responsibility, but rather with the
formal properties of languages and signs. For
Existentialists, meaning is a matter of choice and
commitment; for Structuralists, it's a function of
certain shared systems of communication. In
particular, language pre-dates the individual: it is
less the product of the individual than he or she
is the product of it.
The end.