Essays in existentialism

Essays in existentialism

Essays in existentialism,Works Cited

WebRuggeiro in his edited master-piece, “Existentialism” comments, “I believe that never before in the history of thought has such a radical nihilism been expressed, and what is more, WebJan 6,  · We can find early glimpses of what might be called the “existential attitude” (Solomon ) in the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies of antiquity, in the struggle with WebExistentialism Essay Existentialism: Existentialism And Existentialism. He says that human beings don’t have a pre-established purpose or Existentialism. Existentialism WebExistentialism is a philosophy centered upon the reasoning of existence and the way people find themselves living in the world. The comprehension of existentialism is that WebNov 5,  · Yet, the studied stories suggest that there is a man – made form of existence that resembles humans in terms of reasoning, cognizing or even feeling ... read more

When he has a toothache, he refuses to see the doctor; when he is at a party with former school mates, he behaves in outrageous and humiliating ways; when the prostitute Liza reaches out to him in tenderness, he lashes out at her in rage. In this sense, the underground man is an anti-hero. This account of freedom suggests that my being or identity is always penetrated by the possibility its own negation because I can always question myself and assign new meanings to and interpretations of who I am in the future. My self-interpretation is always insecure or unstable. I may interpret myself as a philosophy professor today, but I am also not a professor insofar as I can freely choose to reject this identity and resign from my job tomorrow. Understood this way, anxiety is not directed at some external object or event in the world.

If I am an incarnation of freedom, it is directed at me ; I am the source of it. But in the wake of Marxist criticism in the s and s, his views changed; he realized that this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced by Cartesian assumptions. The view is also developed by her compatriot Merleau-Ponty. In Phenomenology of Perception , for example, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of nothing. We are simultaneously self-making and already made. As we will see in section 6. Existentialism is well known for its critique of mass society and our tendency to conform to the levelled-down norms and expectations of the public. Living this way can be comforting, creating the illusion that we are living well because we are doing what everyone else does.

But for the existentialist, this conformist way of being is a manifestation of inauthenticity or self-deception because it shows how we are unwilling or unable to face up to the freedom and contingency of our condition; it reveals the extent to which we are afraid of being an individual, of being true to ourselves, and of making our own life-defining choices. I am in bad faith, for example, when I over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation.

For the existentialists, the possibility of breaking free from engrained patterns of self-deception is generally not something that is accomplished by means of detached reflection. It emerges in the wake of powerful emotional experiences or moods. Although terrifying, the existentialist makes it clear that we should not close our eyes or flee from these experiences because they are structural to the human condition. Instead of turning away from this basic anxiety, the existentialist asks us to turn toward and face it, because it is amidst a collapsing world that the ultimate questions emerge: Who am I? and What now? In this way, the existentialist sees the experience of anxiety and its related moods as an opportunity for personal growth and transformation. World-shattering moods open me up to the possibility of being authentic, of accepting and affirming the unsettling givens of my condition, of being released from distractions and trivialities, and of recognizing the self-defining projects that matter to me as an individual.

Such a life is invariably scattered and disjointed, pulled apart by temporal desires and the fleeting fads and fashions of the public. This is because, for Kierkegaard, the subjective truth of the individual is higher than the universal truths of morality. And this means there may be times in our lives where we must suspend our obligation to the ethical sphere and accept the terrible fact that it may be more important to be authentic to be true to oneself than it is to be moral to do what is right. In Fear and Trembling , Kierkegaard draws on the biblical figure of Abraham to make this point.

As a father, Abraham has a moral duty to love and protect his son, but when God demands that he break this commandment and kill Isaac, he is confronted with a personal truth that is higher than the universal. As a religious existentialist, Kierkegaard contends that this is what is required to enter the sphere of faith and become a Christian. It has nothing to do with membership in a congregation or obedience to doctrinal statements. It is, rather, a willingness to commit to a truth that is fundamentally irrational and absurd. It compels us to follow a path that no one else may understand. But with the despair of faith comes feelings of intensity, even joy, as we recognize the absurdity of religious existence, that the eternal or divine is not found in some otherworldly realm, it is bound up in the temporal; that it is this life , the finite, that has infinite significance.

Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche is critical of our tendency to follow the herd and cling to universal moral principles. He forwards a conception of authenticity that accepts our nihilistic predicament and rises above Christian values of good and evil. Camus describes this attitude as a form of rebellion against servile and conformist ways of being. But not everyone has the inborn power to rebel against tradition and creatively express their unique style of living. To this end, his account of authenticity is unapologetically elitist and anti-democratic. Most of us are too mired in self-deception, too frightened and weak to break with the herd and become who we are.

Falling creates the illusion that our existence or being-in-the-world is secure and thing-like because we are doing what everyone else does. But, for Heidegger, there is nothing that fundamentally secures our existence. As a self-making activity, I am not a stable thing. For Heidegger, authenticity demands an openness and flexibility with how I interpret myself. Sartre and Beauvoir follow Heidegger in viewing self-deception as structural to the human condition. Human beings are, on their view, always in the process of making or constituting themselves, modifying and negating their being through moment-to-moment choices and actions. This means my identity is never fixed or stable because I can always choose to take a new path or interpret myself in other ways.

And this situation appears to undermine the prospect of authenticity altogether. If the self is always unstable, always in question, how can I ever be genuine or true to myself? It involves, rather, a clear-eyed awareness and acceptance of the instability and ambiguity of the human condition. And, along with this acceptance, a willingness to act in the face of this ambiguity and to take responsibility, however horrible, for wherever these actions might lead. But just because existence is fundamentally ambiguous does not mean that our chosen projects are meaningless or absurd. My projects have meaning and value because I chose these projects, but the meaning is contingent; it is never enduring or stable.

The point of authenticity, then, is not to be concerned with who I am —because, at bottom, I am nothing. It is to be concerned with what I do. For Sartre and Beauvoir, to be authentic is to recover and accept the ambiguous tension of the self, that: we are who we are not —and— we are not who are. And by means of this recovery, recognize that the task of existence involves acting and doing, that is, realizing our freedom through projects in the world but also, as we will see, taking responsibility for how these projects might enhance or diminish freedom for others. Existentialist ethics generally begins with the idea that there is no external moral order or table of values that exists a priori. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. But this does not mean that it cannot justify itself, that it cannot give itself reasons for being that it does not have.

When I acknowledge that freedom is my essence, I must also acknowledge that it is the essence of others and work, to the best of my ability, to help them realize it. My freedom, then, is not free-floating; it is invariably bound up in the freedom of others. And the look has the power to strip away my freedom and turn me into an object. Human relations, on this account, are best understood as a form of conflict, a dyadic power struggle where I try to assert my freedom and subjectivity by turning the Other into an object, while the Other tries to do the same to me.

But the struggle to objectify and possess the Other by stripping them of their freedom is a manifestation of inauthentic being-for-others. There is an authentic counterpart. In this way authenticity and morality belong together, whereby we have a shared obligation to liberate or free each other so that we can create ourselves and take responsibility for the life we lead. Here, we see the development of an ethical maxim: to act in such a way as to will the realization of your own freedom and the realization of freedom for others. And this recognition may serve as the foundation for an ethics by pulling us out of our everyday self-absorption and awakening us, not to our freedom, but to our essential dependency.

Such a view leads not to self-actualization but to loneliness and despair. Against the vision of the willful subject who makes choices without evaluative limits or constraints, Dostoevsky suggests it is only in recognizing the Other as dependent and vulnerable that we can come to recognize ourselves. True freedom emerges when we release ourselves from the bondage of our own egoistic striving and adopt an attitude of humility and self-sacrifice. The aim is to show that the human being is not an isolated will but a frail and defenseless being that is dependent on the self-less love, compassion, and charity of others. The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber expands on this idea in his masterwork I and Thou. This relation is comforting because it creates the illusion that we have control of our situation.

Buber refers to this as an experience of grace, where the Other is revealed to me as a whole person, defenseless and exposed, and I am revealed in the same way. For Buber, exposure to the I-You relation shakes us out of our own egoistic concerns and awakens us to the fact that we are not isolated individuals but beings who are always in living relation with others. The Nazi occupation of France, his own experience as a prisoner of war, and the attacks on his philosophy from influential Marxist critics, compelled Sartre to shift his focus from the individual to the social. Of all the major developers of existentialism, it is unquestionably Beauvoir who offered the most sustained and influential analyses of oppression and of possibilities for emancipation, not only in her feminist masterwork The Second Sex , but in her bleak account of the dehumanization of the elderly in The Coming of Age [] and her reflections on the experience of Black populations in the Jim Crow South in her memoir America Day by Day [].

Human beings have no essential nature; no one is born inferior or submissive. We are constituted intersubjectively by growing into, internalizing, and enacting ready-made structures of oppression. But insofar as these structures are constituted and maintained by the choices and actions of individuals, they are not fixed and static. Like human beings, they too are subject to change. Here we see how the recognition that existence precedes essence moves from the ontological realm to the ethical, it becomes a call to action, to engage and transform the material conditions that limit the possibilities of choice for those who are oppressed and marginalized.

And insofar as these social determinations are not fixed and timeless but contingent human constructs, they can be resisted and transformed to free others. Existentialism has had a profound impact on how philosophers conceptualize and understand the human condition, with rich accounts of affectivity and embodiment, facticity or worldliness , and the ways in which we are constituted intersubjectively. It has opened new paths for philosophy to engage with concrete and acute human problems, from sexuality, race, disability, and old age to broader issues of social and political violence and oppressive relations in general.

And the movement continues to thrive in the academy today. There is a cascade of scholarship published every year in leading journals and academic presses that captures the enduring relevance of existentialist thought, including important new work engaging the significance of French existentialism as an ethical theory Webber , reframing our conceptions of virtue and human flourishing McMullin , and even addressing current analytic debates in philosophies of life-extension, anti-natalism, and transhumanism Buben Indeed, the core ideas and major figures of existentialism are not just alive and well; they are shaping developments in a diverse range of areas across the humanities and social sciences. The legacy is most clearly present in the European philosophies that proceeded it.

The subject is, rather, shaped in advance by sociohistorical structures, an overlapping network of norms and practices, linguistic conventions, and shared meanings, and this shaping takes place in a way that we are never fully conscious of. They are, after all, still committed to the value of freedom and authenticity, but they recognize that freedom is never unconditioned. In viewing the self not as a substance or thing but as a self-interpreting, meaning-giving activity that is always already bound up in the world, existentialism has also informed key developments in narrative and hermeneutic philosophy. Prominent anglophone philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt , Charles Taylor , and Alasdair MacIntyre have drawn on classical existentialism to illuminate how we exist in the meanings and self-interpretations that we create for ourselves.

My sense of who I am is constituted by an ongoing process of choosing, pulling together, and consolidating the roles, projects, and meanings that matter to me and that are made available by the sociohistorical situation I find myself in. On this view, the story I create for myself is held together by the narrative unity and cohesion that I give to it. And this conception of narrative identity not only offers a response to overly reductive conceptions of the self that are grounded in the substance ontologies of mind and body; it demonstrates an attentiveness to the ambiguous tension of our condition, that our choices are both self-fashioning and socially embedded, that we simultaneously make ourselves and are already made. Key works by Shaun Gallagher , Thomas Fuchs, , and Dan Zahavi have replaced the picture of the disembodied mind with the now widely accepted notion of the embedded, enactive, and embodied self.

Existentialism illuminates how—as a situated way of being-in-the-world—human beings already embody a tacit understanding of the world in a way that we are not and can never be thematically conscious of. This means we do not understand things as discrete objects. We understand things in terms of how we use and handle them and in terms of the purposive, meaning-giving roles these things play in our everyday lives. The traditional view of the mind as something resembling the rule-governed processes of a computer program have continually failed to capture this ambiguous and embodied sense of being-in-the-world. The attentiveness to conditions of oppression, subjugation, and violence among postwar existentialists in France has had a decisive impact on recent developments in critical phenomenology by giving voice to those who have been historically marginalized or undervalued in the western tradition.

The focus on the ways in which structures of discrimination along with the limits of our own embodiment can constrain our capacities for freedom and transcendence has, in turn, influenced recent phenomenological accounts of intersectionality and the lived experience of, among others, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and exiles Coulthard ; Ortega , queer and trans identities Ahmed ; Salamon , those who are imprisoned or in solitary confinement Guenther ; Leder , and the elderly, disabled, and chronically ill Aho ; Reynolds ; Dickel Interpreting existence in terms of the situated activity of being-in-the-world not only serves as a rejection of substance ontology and the metaphysical dualisms subject-object; mind-body; inner-outer that we inherit from Cartesian and empiricist epistemologies; it also reveals deep affinities with the nonduality of Buddhism and other incarnations of Eastern thought.

These endeavors have exposed the limitations of the scientific worldview and our uncritical dependence on technological innovation to address the current ecological crisis. Modern science generally assumes a binary paradigm of the subject as separate and distinct from a value-less domain of objects or nature , a domain that can, in turn, be mastered and controlled by technoscience. In this way, it betrays our ordinary experience, that in our day-to-day lives we are not atomistic, self-certain subjects but beings that are fundamentally entwined with the world and the meaning and value that this intertwining brings to our experience.

For the existentialist, then, extricating ourselves from environmental doom requires not a technoscientific fix but an ontological transformation in our own self-understanding, an awaking to the reality of our interdependence with nature, that the earth is not apart from us but rather part of us. Outside of the humanities and social sciences, existentialism has also had a deep and lasting impact on the allied health professions. To this end, existentialism has informed a move away from the reductive and objectifying tendencies of modern biomedicine to recover the first-person experience of health and illness, viewing the body not so much as a biophysical machine that needs to be adjusted and maintained but as the experiential and interpretative medium of our existence.

Beyond its ascendency in the healing arts, its myriad cultural influences, and its wide-ranging impact on the humanities and social sciences, the enduring legacy of existentialism is perhaps most visible in the classroom. Existentialist-themed courses are often among the most popular in the philosophy curriculum as young students confront, for the first time, the unsettling questions of freedom and the meaning of their own existence. And these questions have never been more pressing as they develop against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change, species extinction, global pandemics, and the reemergence of authoritarian and fascist politics. Amidst these planetary emergencies, a new generation is facing the predicament of nihilism and the death of God and owning up to the uncanny truth of the human condition: that existence precedes essence.

Beauvoir, Simone de Buber, Martin Heidegger, Martin hermeneutics Husserl, Edmund Jaspers, Karl Kierkegaard, Søren Marcel, Gabriel -Honoré Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Nietzsche, Friedrich Ortega y Gasset, José phenomenology Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University. Menu Browse Table of Contents What's New Random Entry Chronological Archives About Editorial Information About the SEP Editorial Board How to Cite the SEP Special Characters Advanced Tools Contact Support SEP Support the SEP PDFs for SEP Friends Make a Donation SEPIA for Libraries. Entry Navigation Entry Contents Bibliography Academic Tools Friends PDF Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top.

Existentialism First published Fri Jan 6, Nihilism : The emergence of existentialism as an intellectual movement was influenced by the rise of nihilism in late nineteenth century Europe as the pre-modern religious worldview was replaced with one that was increasingly secular and scientific. Engagement vs. Detachment : Against a philosophical tradition that privileges the standpoint of theoretical detachment and objectivity, existentialism generally begins in medias res , amidst our own situated, first-person experience. The human condition is revealed through an examination of the ways we concretely engage with the world in our everyday lives and struggle to make sense of and give meaning to our existence. This means our essence is not given in advance; we are contingently thrown into existence and are burdened with the task of creating ourselves through our choices and actions.

Freedom : Existentialists agree that what distinguishes our existence from that of other beings is that we are self-conscious and exist for ourselves, which means we are free and responsible for who are and what we do. This does not mean we are wholly undetermined but, rather, that we are always beyond or more than ourselves because of our capacity to interpret and give meaning to whatever limits or determines us. Authenticity : Existentialists are critical of our ingrained tendency to conform to the norms and expectations of the public world because it prevents us from being authentic or true to ourselves. An authentic life is one that is willing to break with tradition and social convention and courageously affirm the freedom and contingency of our condition.

It is generally understood to refer to a life lived with a sense of urgency and commitment based on the meaning-giving projects that matter to each of us as individuals. Ethics : Although they reject the idea of moral absolutes and universalizing judgments about right conduct, existentialism should not be dismissed for promoting moral nihilism. For the existentialist, a moral or praiseworthy life is possible. It is one where we acknowledge and own up to our freedom, take full responsibility for our choices, and act in such a way as to help others realize their freedom. These ideas serve to structure the entry. Nihilism and the Crisis of Modernity 2. Detachment 2. Existence Precedes Essence 4.

Freedom 4. Authenticity 5. Ethics 6. Contemporary Relevance 7. Detachment From Plato onward, Western philosophy has generally prioritized a methodology grounded in a perspective of rational detachment and objectivity to arrive at truths that are immutable and timeless. Freedom Recognizing that there is no pre-given essence that determines existence, the existentialist makes it clear that it is up to the individual to make his, her, or their own identity through choices and actions. Authenticity Existentialism is well known for its critique of mass society and our tendency to conform to the levelled-down norms and expectations of the public. Ethics Existentialist ethics generally begins with the idea that there is no external moral order or table of values that exists a priori.

Contemporary Relevance Existentialism has had a profound impact on how philosophers conceptualize and understand the human condition, with rich accounts of affectivity and embodiment, facticity or worldliness , and the ways in which we are constituted intersubjectively. Bibliography Adorno, T. The jargon of authenticity , K. Will trans. Ahmed, S. Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others , Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aho, K. Existentialism: An introduction , 2 nd edition. Cambridge: Polity. One beat more: Existentialism and the gift of mortality , Cambridge: Polity. Existential medicine: Essays on health and illness , London: Rowman and Littlefield. Baert, P. The existentialist moment: The rise of Sartre as a public intellectual , Cambridge: Polity.

Beauvoir, S. de, []. The ethics of ambiguity , B. Frechtman trans. The second sex , H. Parshley trans. The blood of others , Y. Moyse and R. Senhouse trans. The mandarins , L. Friedman trans. After the war: The force of circumstance, volume 1, — , R. Howard trans. The coming of age , P. America day by day , C. Cosman trans. Brown, C. Eco-phenomenology: Back to the earth itself , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Buben, A. Existentialism and the desirability of immortality , London: Routledge. Buber, M. I and thou , W. Kaufmann trans. Gregor-Smith trans. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversions of identity , New York: Routledge. Camus, A. The rebel: An essay on man in revolt , H.

Read trans. Cooper, M. Existential therapies , London: Sage. Cotkin, G. Existential America , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Coulthard, G. Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dickel, S. Embodying difference: Critical phenomenology and narratives of disability, race, and sexuality , Dordrecht: Springer. Dostoevsky, F. The brothers Karamazov , C. Garnett trans. Notes from the underground , C. Dreyfus, H. Fanon, F. Black skin, white masks , C. Markmann trans. Foucault, M. Bouchard ed. Frankfurt, H. Fuchs, T.

Ecology of the brain: the phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, S. How the body shapes the mind , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, L. Existence in black: An anthology of black existential philosophy , New York: Routledge. Guenther, L. Solitary confinement: Social death and its alternatives , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Guignon, C. Guignon ed. On being authentic , London: Routledge. But it be- came a major movement in the second half of the 20th century.

Existentialism is not a systematic body of thought like Marxism or psychoanalysis. Instead, it is more like an umbrella under which a very wide range of thinkers struggled with ques- tions about the meaning of life. Much of the appeal and popularity of Existential- ism is due to the. This is a central claim of existentialism. This philosophical theory stated that humans have no predetermined purpose and that any purpose your life has is given to it by you. Existentialism was a popular approach during and after World War II, which was when Anouilh wrote this version of Antigone, that led many people to abandon any belief in an ordered world. Although Jean Anouilh. Essay Topics Writing. Home Page Research Existentialism Essay.

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Although the most popular voices of this movement were French, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as compatriots such as Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the conceptual groundwork of the movement was laid much earlier in the nineteenth century by pioneers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century German philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers as well as prominent Spanish intellectuals José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno. The core ideas have also been illuminated in key literary works. Beyond the plays, short stories, and novels by French luminaries like Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, there were Parisian writers such as Jean Genet and André Gide, the Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the work of Norwegian authors such as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, and the German-language iconoclasts Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke.

What distinguishes existentialism from other movements in the intellectual history of the West is how it stretched far beyond the literary and academic worlds. Its ideas are captured in films by Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Goddard, Akira Kurosawa, and Terrence Malick. Its moods are expressed in the paintings of Edvard Munch, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Edward Hopper and in the vitiated forms of the sculptor Alberto Giocometti. Its emphasis on freedom and the struggle for self-creation informed the radical and emancipatory politics of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as well as the writings of Black intellectuals such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and W. Du Bois. Its engagement with the relationship between faith and freedom and the incomprehensibility of God shaped theological debates through the lectures and writings of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, among others.

And, with its penetrating analyses of anxiety and the importance of self-realization, the movement has had a profound impact in the development of humanistic and existential approaches to psychotherapy in the work of a wide range of theorists, including R. Laing, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, and Irvin Yalom. The word, first introduced by Marcel in , is certainly not a reference to a coherent system or philosophical school. And there are those who regard our relations with others as largely mired in conflict and self-deception and others who recognize a deep capacity for self-less love and interdependence.

Given these disparate threads and the fact that there is no unifying doctrine, one can nonetheless distill a set of overlapping ideas that bind the movement together. But it was not until the nineteenth century that the ideas began to coalesce into a bona fide intellectual movement. By this time, an increasingly secular and scientific worldview was emerging and the traditional religious framework that gave pre-modern life a sense of moral orientation and cohesion was beginning to collapse. The rise of Protestantism also played a role. With its rejection of hierarchical Church authority, this new form of Christianity emphasized subjective inwardness and created a unique social configuration grounded in principles of individualism, freedom, and self-reliance.

The result was the loss of a sense of community and belongingness rooted in the close-knit social bonds of traditional society. Along with these historical developments, social transformations associated with the Industrial Revolution and the formation of the modern state were emerging. With newly mechanized working conditions and bureaucratic forms of administration, an increasingly impersonal and alienating social order was established. And the novels and short stories of Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kafka capture the bourgeois emptiness and boredom of the managerial class and the paranoia and distrust that emerges when life is regulated and controlled by faceless bureaucrats. These social transformations created the conditions for nihilism, where modern humanity suddenly found itself adrift and confused, unsure of which path to take or where to look for a stable and enduring sense of truth and meaning.

The condition of nihilism involves the shocking recognition that there is no overarching reason, order, or purpose to our existence, that it is all fundamentally meaningless and absurd. Of all the existentialists, Nietzsche was the most influential and prophetic in diagnosing and conceptualizing the crisis. And it is against this anomic background that the question of existence, of what it means to be, becomes so urgent. But it is a question that requires taking a radically different standpoint than the one privileged by the philosophical tradition. From Plato onward, Western philosophy has generally prioritized a methodology grounded in a perspective of rational detachment and objectivity to arrive at truths that are immutable and timeless.

Existentialism offers a thoroughgoing rejection of this view, arguing that we cannot look down on the human condition from a detached, third-person perspective because we are already thrown into the self-interpreting event or activity of existing, an activity that is always embodied, felt, and historically situated. Existence, then, is generally grasped not just through dispassionate theorizing but through a careful analysis of first-person experience, of the concrete, flesh and blood particulars of everyday life and the feelings, relationships, and commitments that make us who we are. It is a philosophy that begins from the standpoint of the engagé , of the individual who is engaged in life and who confronts the givens of existence.

The existentialist critique of theoretical detachment was pioneered by Kierkegaard whose scorn was directed primarily at G. This means the abstract truths of philosophical detachment are always subordinate to the concrete truths of the existing individual. And subjective truth cannot be reasoned about or explained logically; it emerges out of the situated commitments, affects, and needs of the individual. For Kierkegaard, to live this truth invariably results in feelings of anxiety and confusion because it is objectively uncertain; it has no rational justification, and no one else can understand or relate to it. It is an ineffable truth that is felt rather than known. Truths of flesh and blood cannot be reduced to systematic explanation because such truths do not provide us with objective knowledge.

Rather, they lay bare the passionate and urgent sense of how we should live our lives. Truths, for Nietzsche, are best understood as social constructs; they are created or invented by a historical people, and they endure only so long as they are socially useful. This means human beings are already bound up in socially constructed perspectives that they cannot disengage or detach from. Nietzsche goes on to suggest there is a psychological motivation in our shared belief in objective truth. It shelters us from the terrifying contingency and mutability of existence. Nietzsche understands that human beings are vulnerable and frightened creatures, and the belief in truth—even though it is an illusion—has social and pragmatic utility by providing a measure of coherence and reliability.

We need these truths for psychological protection, to help us cope with an otherwise chaotic and precarious existence. As a phenomenologist, he is concerned with how we are. In his version of phenomenology, Dasein is viewed not as a substance with what-like characteristics but as a self-interpreting, meaning-giving activity. There is no inner-outer dualism because the self is not a disembodied mind or consciousness. It is the activity of existing, a relational activity that is structurally bound up in the world. It is the relational setting of our lives, the shared context of meaning that we are already involved in.

And our involvement in the world allows objects to count and matter to us in particular ways. Third, Heidegger suggests that being-in-the-world is a meaning-giving activity. When we engage with and handle objects in the world, we give them meaning; we encounter them as meaningful. What appears to us in the immediacy of lived experience is always shaped by the public meanings we grow into. The experience of hearing, for example, is not a representation of bare sense data because sounds are invariably colored by the context of meaning we are thrown into. Meaning, on this view, is not generated by detached cognitive associations.

It emerges against the background of our functional involvement in the world, in the way we are situated and engaged in a shared network of equipment, roles, institutions, and projects. In this way, philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Marcel challenge the traditional interpretation of the body. The body is not something I have. It is a site of affectivity and meaning. It is who I am. And I cannot obtain objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it; it is the experiential medium of my existence. By building on the analysis of the lived body corps propre , corps vécu , corps vivant , Leib , existentialists reveal how our moods, perceptions, and experiences are already bound up in worldly meanings, how we internalize these meanings, and how this act of internalization shapes the way we live, how we handle the tools of daily life, maneuver through lived space, relate to others, and interpret and perform our identities.

In her pathbreaking work The Second Sex , Beauvoir illuminates this point by showing how a woman tends to internalize the dominant androcentric worldview, resulting in a representation of herself as subordinate, weak, and inferior. By rejecting the standpoint of theoretical detachment and focusing on the structures of embodiment and being-in-the-world, influential thinkers such as Franz Fanon [] , Iris Marion Young [] , and Judith Butler , among others, have explored different ways in which we enact and embody forms of oppression and how this can shape our self-image and inhibit the experience of movement, spatial orientation, and other forms of bodily comportment.

These investigations help to broaden and pluralize our understanding of the human condition by shedding light on a diverse range of embodied perspectives, from ethnicity and race, sex and gender, and age and physical ability. We exist for ourselves as self-making or self-defining beings, and we are always in the process of making or defining ourselves through the situated choices we make as our lives unfold. The point here is that there can be no complete or definitive account of being human because there is nothing that grounds or secures our existence. Existence, then, is not a static thing; it is a dynamic process of self-making.

If I am compelled by a strong desire for sex, alcohol, or cigarettes, for instance, I do not out of necessity have to act on these desires. I have the freedom to question them and give them meaning, and the meanings I attribute to them shape my choices and the direction my life will take going forward. This means, unlike other organisms, we are self-conscious beings who can surpass our facticity by calling it into question, interpreting it in different ways, and making decisions about how to deal with it in the future. We are not wholly determined by our nature because our nature is always a question or an issue for us.

We have the capacity to reflect on and care about it. And the way we care about our nature informs how we create ourselves. Our facticity reveals itself to us only through the self-defining meanings and values that we give to it. This idea that facticity can always be nullified or negated by our choices reveals the key to understanding the existentialist conception of freedom. Recognizing that there is no pre-given essence that determines existence, the existentialist makes it clear that it is up to the individual to make his, her, or their own identity through choices and actions. Sartre explains that the coward, for instance, is not the way he is because of an unstable childhood or a particular genetic makeup. In this way, the existentialist generally affirms the view that the human being has free will, is able to make decisions, and can be held responsible for their actions.

It means, rather, that existence is structured by our capacity to give meaning to our situation based on the actions and choices we make as our lives unfold. Insofar as we exist, we are envisioning a certain kind of life, assigning a value to our identity, and making ourselves into the kind of person we are. When we become aware of our freedom as an inescapable given of the human condition, the awareness is often accompanied by anxiety because we realize that we alone are responsible for our choices and the projects we undertake. There is no moral absolute, divine will, or natural law that can provide guidance or justify our actions.

In the canon of existentialist literature, no writer captures this idea better than Dostoevsky in his Notes from the Underground. When he has a toothache, he refuses to see the doctor; when he is at a party with former school mates, he behaves in outrageous and humiliating ways; when the prostitute Liza reaches out to him in tenderness, he lashes out at her in rage. In this sense, the underground man is an anti-hero. This account of freedom suggests that my being or identity is always penetrated by the possibility its own negation because I can always question myself and assign new meanings to and interpretations of who I am in the future.

My self-interpretation is always insecure or unstable. I may interpret myself as a philosophy professor today, but I am also not a professor insofar as I can freely choose to reject this identity and resign from my job tomorrow. Understood this way, anxiety is not directed at some external object or event in the world. If I am an incarnation of freedom, it is directed at me ; I am the source of it. But in the wake of Marxist criticism in the s and s, his views changed; he realized that this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced by Cartesian assumptions. The view is also developed by her compatriot Merleau-Ponty. In Phenomenology of Perception , for example, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of nothing.

We are simultaneously self-making and already made. As we will see in section 6. Existentialism is well known for its critique of mass society and our tendency to conform to the levelled-down norms and expectations of the public. Living this way can be comforting, creating the illusion that we are living well because we are doing what everyone else does.

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WebExistentialism Essay Existentialism: Existentialism And Existentialism. He says that human beings don’t have a pre-established purpose or Existentialism. Existentialism WebNov 5,  · Yet, the studied stories suggest that there is a man – made form of existence that resembles humans in terms of reasoning, cognizing or even feeling WebJan 6,  · We can find early glimpses of what might be called the “existential attitude” (Solomon ) in the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies of antiquity, in the struggle with WebRuggeiro in his edited master-piece, “Existentialism” comments, “I believe that never before in the history of thought has such a radical nihilism been expressed, and what is more, WebExistentialism is a philosophy centered upon the reasoning of existence and the way people find themselves living in the world. The comprehension of existentialism is that ... read more

Therefore, man, instead of waiting to realize what is given to him, should conceive himself as a free, responsible, spring and striving becoming. In this way, the existentialist sees the experience of anxiety and its related moods as an opportunity for personal growth and transformation. Essays on Existentialism. Fundamentally, it is an attitude and outlook which emphasizes human existence rather than man in the abstract. People around the robots of these stories try to integrate them in a human society, which departs from the existentialism concept that suggests that individuals should develop independent of social standards. He is in the process of becoming who withstands bad weathers in the way to become complete man. Sartre 's Existentialism And Existentialism.

Essays in Existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre Citadel Press- Existentialism - pages 2 Reviews Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified. Existentialism Existentialism refers to the philosophical movement or tendency of the nineteenth and twentyth centuries. USA Main Site Philosophy, Stanford University Info about mirror essays in existentialism. Sartre is the dominant figure in post-war French intellectual life. It should be designed in such a way that it will provide every sort of experiences which constitute his life, essays in existentialism.