Insight Editions · No. 47
The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism
Steven Crowell (ed.)
Essays examine existentialism’s origins, major thinkers, central concepts, and influence across literature, religion, politics, race, psychiatry, and modern philosophical thought.
A study guide to The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism by Steven Crowell (ed.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Existentialism is a movement, not a mood. Crowell treats it as a living legacy whose slogans still do philosophical work; Cooper defends a real "family" moving from estrangement to an ethics of reciprocal freedom; McBride traces the cultural wave from 1945 (ch1-3).
- The self is a relation to itself. Hannay and Dreyfus read Kierkegaard (with Pascal) on the self as a synthesis that must be held together by a commitment, and on indirect communication (ch4-5).
- After the death of God, values are created. Schacht and Hatab read Nietzsche on revaluation, the agonistic self, and creative affirmation of life without metaphysical backing (ch6-7).
- Dasein is care, and owns itself in resoluteness. Blattner lays out the existential analytic; Harries shows Heidegger's critique of humanism caught in an antinomy of Being (ch8-9).
- Consciousness is nothing, and freedom is a burden of responsibility. Crowell reads Sartre's consciousness, Flynn his political career, and Kristana Arp Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity and The Second Sex (ch10-12).
- The body is the subject. Carman reads Merleau-Ponty from the body schema to the flesh (ch13).
- Existentialism reaches beyond philosophy. Malpas on literature, Westphal on religion, Bernasconi on racism as a system in Fanon and Sartre, and Ratcliffe and Broome on psychiatric illness as altered possibility (ch14-17).
The volume's argument: one problem of self-relating existence, worked out by each thinker and then carried into other fields.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title and author | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Existentialism and Its Legacy (Steven Crowell) | A living legacy: authenticity, Angst and the absurd still do work |
| 2 | Existentialism as a Philosophical Movement (David E. Cooper) | The existentialist family and its manifesto, from estrangement to freedom |
| 3 | Existentialism as a Cultural Movement (William McBride) | Paris after 1945, its arts, and its global spread |
| 4 | Kierkegaard's Single Individual (Alastair Hannay) | Why the single individual needs indirect communication |
| 5 | Pascal and Kierkegaard on the Contradictory Self (Hubert L. Dreyfus) | The self as a synthesis held by unconditional commitment |
| 6 | Nietzsche: After the Death of God (Richard Schacht) | Revaluation and the naturalization of the human |
| 7 | Nietzsche: Selfhood, Creativity, and Philosophy (Lawrence J. Hatab) | An agonistic, creative self that affirms finite life |
| 8 | Heidegger: The Existential Analytic of Dasein (William Blattner) | Care, anxiety, death and resoluteness |
| 9 | The Antinomy of Being (Karsten Harries) | Heidegger's anti-humanism and its unresolved tension |
| 10 | Sartre's Existentialism and Consciousness (Steven Crowell) | Nothingness, bad faith, and the Look |
| 11 | Political Existentialism (Thomas R. Flynn) | Sartre's road from the RDR to the Critique |
| 12 | Simone de Beauvoir's Existentialism (Kristana Arp) | Ambiguity, situated freedom, and woman as Other |
| 13 | Merleau-Ponty on Body, Flesh, and Visibility (Taylor Carman) | From the body schema to the flesh of the world |
| 14 | Existentialism as Literature (Jeff Malpas) | Why existential thought takes literary form |
| 15 | Existentialism and Religion (Merold Westphal) | Faith, the death of God, and religious existentialism |
| 16 | Racism is a System (Robert Bernasconi) | Fanon and Sartre turn existentialism dialectical |
| 17 | Psychiatric Illness and the Death of Possibilities (Matthew Ratcliffe and Matthew Broome) | Schizophrenia and depression as altered spaces of possibility |
About this book
The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism by Steven Crowell (ed.), 2012. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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Existentialism and Its Legacy (Steven Crowell)
Scandal and substance
Steven Crowell opens with a 1951 anecdote from Maurice Natanson: lecturing on Sartre's Nausea to a philosophical society, he was interrupted by a philosopher who protested that such matters "should not be discussed in front of ladies". An air of scandal has followed the movement everywhere: a press campaign against Kierkegaard in Copenhagen, academic vilification of Nietzsche's first book (he self-published several others), critics calling Heidegger "death-obsessed", and Sartre never holding an academic post. Together with its reach through literature, art and film, this explains why existentialism, almost alone among the "isms", is revived by name in every generation as a way of life, down to Beauvoir's young people in black who "assume an air of ennui".
With most movements students learn the ideas first and the cultural context later; with existentialism it is the reverse. The attitude is familiar, the philosophical content less so. The volume is therefore "conceived as an argument for the thesis that existential concepts and ideas have much to teach us" in a climate far from the one that produced them. Cooper's chapter (ch2 here) supplies a "manifesto" of such ideas; later chapters confirm, enhance or contest it.
Five places the legacy shows up
Philosophy of science. Commitment runs from Kierkegaard's faith through Heidegger's resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) to Sartre's engagement. John Haugeland, starting from analytic debates about mental content, argues that "existential commitment", the freedom "to take responsibility for the norms and skills in terms of which one copes with things", is a necessary condition of all determinate cognition, scientific cognition included. Norms are public, but they bind only if I embrace them first-personally, and this cannot be parsed into beliefs plus desires. The norms are ungrounded, and for science to be beholden to objects the whole "world" my commitments sustain must be able to collapse; I must be prepared to endure the "nothingness" of my commitments. Haugeland calls this a "new existentialism", developed in dialogue with Dennett, Searle and McDowell.
One existential concept traced from its classical sources to analytic philosophy of science.
Ethics. Every major existentialist in the volume except Beauvoir has been accused of lacking an ethics or of confusing ethics with politics. In the 1970s Karl-Otto Apel described positivism and existentialism as a complementary "division of labor": both held that objectivity is exhausted by the sciences while value is subjective conviction, a view matched by positivist emotivism and meta-ethics. The real legacy (the constitutive weight of choice and commitment, conflict between meaning and virtue, self-responsibility over rational grounding, refusing to define the human as "rational animal") made that division obsolete once Kuhn broke positivism in science.
The new field of moral psychology, which did not exist when Apel wrote, carries this legacy. Bernard Williams's tension between "experience" and the "impartial standpoint" was first sharply formulated by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and his fine-grained description matches the phenomenological method. Similar points hold for Harry Frankfurt on "care", Richard Moran on first-person "avowal", Charles Taylor on "strong evaluation" and Stephen Darwall on the authority of address. Iris Murdoch's 1970 charge, in The Sovereignty of Good, that ethics had fled real human issues "could never be made today".
| Thinker | Contemporary idea | Existential root |
|---|---|---|
| Haugeland | Existential commitment as condition of cognition | Resoluteness; nothingness of commitments |
| Williams | Meaningful vs rationally groundable | Kierkegaard, Nietzsche; authenticity, the absurd |
| Korsgaard | Practical identity as source of normativity | Self made through choice; facticity |
| Rorty | Contingency, irony, solidarity | Existence precedes essence; critique of metaphysics |
| Late Foucault | Work "upon ourselves as free beings" | Self-making, liberation, philosophy as ethos |
| Derrida (Gift of Death) | Aporia of responsibility | Kierkegaard's Abraham; inwardness, Angst |
| Irigaray, Butler | Embodiment, performative gender | Merleau-Ponty's flesh; Nietzsche, Sartre |
Kantian ethics. Christine Korsgaard accepted Thomas Nagel's description of her work as "rather existentialist". The self is not given as substance or subject but made through choices; inclinations belong to my "facticity" and become mine only through identification or refusal. Her practical identity ("a description under which you value yourself") tracks Haugeland's self-understanding, and it shows that Kant's "anthropological" side is essential, not an appendage: "Kant is more existential than we knew!" Conversely the existentialists are more Kantian: Sartre's alarm clock has its "exigency" only because I get up. Where Sartre says identities are chosen "without justification and without excuse", Korsgaard claims one identity you must value, "your own humanity"; but the hypothetical "must" leads back to the existential problem of suicide.
Where Korsgaard and Sartre part ways.
Pragmatism. Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity "could practically serve as the teaser for a course in existentialism". Drawing on Sellars and Davidson, he deflates the heroic world-originating self into the permanent possibility of redescription in shared language, with no One True Description. Authentic "final vocabularies" must be held with irony, producing a public/private split: irony in private, hope and solidarity (fostered by literature, not argument) in public.
Continental and feminist thought. By the early 1960s Sartre was so prominent that the next two decades of European thought look like "attempts to kill the existentialist beast through a conspiracy of silence". Early Foucault (The Order of Things, 1966; Archaeology, 1969) made "man" "a recent invention" "perhaps nearing its end"; Derrida's "The Ends of Man" (1968) called for-itself, Dasein and transcendental consciousness unstable but necessary amalgams. Both later returned: Foucault's History of Sexuality (1976-84) and "What is Enlightenment?" invoke "work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings" and philosophy as "an attitude, an ethos"; Derrida's The Gift of Death (1992) rereads Kierkegaard's Abraham through Patočka and the aporia of responsibility. Irigaray calls Merleau-Ponty's flesh an "intrauterine fantasy" yet stays "in the draft of a certain existentialism"; Judith Butler's performative gender inherits Nietzsche and Sartre.
How the volume is built
Two principles govern it: it is written for students, and each chapter takes an independent stand. It covers philosophical existentialism only, and the figures most often taught.
The four parts of the Companion and their seventeen chapters.
- Part II, history. Cooper argues "existentialism" names a coherent picture shared by a "family"; McBride places it in the culture of mid-century Europe and its "French epicenter".
- Part III, the philosophers. Paired chapters show two aspects of each figure: Hannay on Kierkegaard's indirect communication and Dreyfus on appropriation; Schacht doubting Nietzsche belongs at all and Hatab on his style; Blattner on Being and Time and Harries on the Letter on Humanism; Crowell on Sartre's consciousness and Flynn on his politics; Kristana Arp on Beauvoir; Carman on Merleau-Ponty's flesh.
- Part IV, reach. Malpas on literature (distinguishing "existential" from "existentialist"), Westphal on religion, Bernasconi on racism as a system in Fanon and Sartre, and Ratcliffe and Broome on the "death of possibilities" in schizophrenia.
Moral psychology and the death of Apel's division
Crowell's ethics story turns on Karl-Otto Apel's 1970s claim that positivism and existentialism shared a "division of labor": science owns objectivity, value is subjective conviction. Once Kuhn broke positivist philosophy of science, that bargain collapsed. The new field of moral psychology (Williams on experience vs the impartial standpoint; Frankfurt on care; Moran on avowal; Taylor on strong evaluation; Darwall on the authority of address) carries existential themes without the old brand name. Iris Murdoch's 1970 charge that ethics had fled real human issues "could never be made today".
Korsgaard, Rorty, and the conspiracy of silence
Christine Korsgaard accepts Nagel's label "rather existentialist": the self is made through choices; inclinations are facticity until identified with. Her practical identity tracks Haugeland's self-understanding. Where Sartre says identities are chosen "without justification and without excuse", she claims one identity you must value, "your own humanity"; Crowell notes that the hypothetical "must" leads back to the existential problem of suicide. Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity nearly "teases" a course in existentialism: final vocabularies held with irony in private, hope and solidarity (via literature) in public.
By the early 1960s Sartre was so prominent that the next two decades of European thought look like attempts to "kill the existentialist beast through a conspiracy of silence". Foucault's archaeology made "man" a recent invention; Derrida's "The Ends of Man" (1968) treated for-itself, Dasein and transcendental consciousness as unstable amalgams. Both later returned: Foucault's late ethics of the self; Derrida's Gift of Death rereading Abraham through Patočka. Feminist inheritance runs through Irigaray's critique of flesh and Butler's performative gender.
Foucault's return and the literary problem
Crowell notes that Foucault's late ethics of the self (care as "work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings"; critique as possible transgression; ethos as a philosophical life) reopens existential questions after the archaeology that had treated "man" as an empirico-transcendental doublet. The same chapter asks why existentialism looked finished: a "literary genre or style" that "cancels the most powerful components" of the philosophy when the novels and plays are treated as the whole. Rorty's private irony / public hope pair, and the question "Why not be cruel? Why be kind?", show how moral psychology and neo-pragmatism still need an answer that existential writers once owned.
Crowell's arc from alleged death to living problems.
Companion itinerary Crowell promises
Crowell's introduction is also a contract for the volume. Part I (Crowell, Cooper, McBride) answers what existentialism was and why the label still earns shelf space. Part II pairs readers so no single "Kierkegaard" or "Nietzsche" or "Heidegger" or "Sartre" hardens into a school portrait: Hannay with Dreyfus, Schacht with Hatab, Blattner with Harries, Crowell with Flynn, then Arp and Carman alone on Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Part III tests reach: literature (Malpas), religion (Westphal), race (Bernasconi), psychiatry (Ratcliffe and Broome). Readers who want only café slogans will be disappointed; readers who want arguments about commitment, worldhood, ambiguity and systems will find the living problems Crowell promised after Apel's division collapsed.
Crowell's editorial map of the Companion.
Existentialism as a Philosophical Movement (David E. Cooper)
2.1 The existentialist "family"
Popular glosses ("the metaphysical expression of the spiritual dishevelment of a post-war age") fit only the cultural movement of Chapter 3. Its philosophical concerns, death and individual moral responsibility, are perennial. Some deny there was ever a shared philosophy: Paul Ricoeur says "the supposed family of 'existentialist' philosophies never really existed". Cooper finds this self-refuting, since Ricoeur's only reason is that the family soon "collapsed", and a family must exist to collapse. Ricoeur would be right about a school: there was no agreed program like the Vienna Circle or the Frankfurt group. Nearly everyone refused the label after Gabriel Marcel first applied it in 1945 to Sartre and Beauvoir, mostly to avoid identification with Sartre, or (Heidegger) because they had already left the views that inspired him.
Calling existentialism "just those expressions" holds only if no serious affinities can be found. The claim that Heidegger and Sartre are "radically opposed in every respect" rests on "wild misrepresentation", above all the image of Sartre as a Cartesian dualist, though he called the Cartesian self a fictitious "idol" and denied a person is "the contingent bringing together of two substances". In Being and Nothingness, Being and Time and Phenomenology of Perception, and in Jaspers, Marcel, Beauvoir, Buber and Ortega y Gasset, Cooper finds affinity on six issues.
| # | Shared issue | Existentialist position |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The predicament that inspires philosophy | A sense of estrangement from the world |
| 2 | The distinctive character of human existence | Reflection, self-interpretation, evaluation, choice |
| 3 | Relation of humans and world | Neither thinkable without the other |
| 4 | Individual freedom | Radical: to choose, act, interpret and evaluate |
| 5 | The tone of a free life | Honest recognition of disturbing freedom |
| 6 | Interpersonal relations | Honour the reciprocal interdependence of lives |
The manifesto in brief: humans are prone to estrangement because, though embodied occupants of the world, their powers of reflection and choice set them apart; yet reflection shows that neither human existence nor world is thinkable without the other, since things are understood through their significance for human purposes; so each person has radical freedom and responsibility to interpret and evaluate, and honest recognition of it requires a stance that honours reciprocal interdependence. The sketch avoids terms of art (absurdity, anxiety, authenticity, bad faith) and is deliberately rough, but definite enough to exclude two myths: existentialists are not irrationalists (they reach their views by reflection, not "thinking with the blood") and not unsystematic (the views form a coherent direction).
The direction of existentialist thought as Cooper reconstructs it (sections 2.2 to 2.5).
The manifesto also sorts claimants. Dostoevsky, Kafka and Rilke treat existential themes without a philosophical perspective. Camus is a harder case: his denials of being a philosopher are not decisive ("a novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images"), but he is no existentialist philosopher because for him man's exile from the world is "without remedy", whereas Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty aim to show we are not in reality estranged. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are better called "fathers" than founders: Nietzsche sometimes rejects radical individual freedom, Kierkegaard does not ground freedom in practice and world, and neither has the intersubjectivity found in Fichte and Hegel.
2.2 Estrangement and existence
Buber's I and Thou says life in an "I-It" relation is "severance and alienation"; Merleau-Ponty says that when we suspend ordinary preoccupations the world appears "hostile and alien". Existentialists hold that this sense is real but misguided: "self and the world belong together", says Heidegger, as "the unity of Being-in-the-world". Estrangement is one of philosophy's oldest themes; Hegel made overcoming alienation the meaning of history, and Cooper quotes an 1818 text on the tension between being "one with the whole" and "separated beings". Materialism and idealism can be read as two opposed styles of overcoming dualist alienation, and even Cartesians softened dualism with a divinely arranged harmony.
The root is human ambiguity: we are embodied things under natural law, yet free, moral and reflective. In Sartre's terms we have facticity and transcendence, which makes us "natural aliens". Some respond with pride, others with envy of fixed creatures (Rilke: "we are not very much at home in this world we've expounded"). Existentialists refuse any flirtation with naturalism, of the kind found in Marx and even Nietzsche. Kierkegaard restricts "existing" to individuals who are "infinitely interested in existing" and "constantly in the process of becoming"; Heidegger's Dasein is a being for whom its Being "is an issue", always "ahead-of-itself" (ex-stare, to stand out). Hence Sartre's slogan "existence precedes essence", and Ortega's line that a person "consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet".
2.3 The human world
All existentialists reject Descartes's dualism of substances: Sartre denies the for-itself is an "autonomous substance"; Ortega calls us "dramas" in the world. Harder is the claim that the world requires human existence: the for-itself is that "by whom it happens that there is a world". This is not idealism, which reduces one substance to another; Merleau-Ponty says both "the world is wholly inside me" and "I am wholly outside myself".
Two kinds of humanism about the world.
Cooper calls this humanism, after William James ("you can't weed out the human contribution") and Sartre ("the only universe that exists is the human one"). It differs from Kant: existentialists reject the appearance/thing-in-itself split and do not appeal to fixed mental structures. Its style comes from Nietzsche, Bergson and the pragmatists: subtract every human contribution and nothing is left, because experience is shaped by purposes; creatures with other needs would not see horses, leaves and stars. Hence Sartre's world of "tasks", Heidegger's "equipment", Ortega's "favourable and adverse conditions". But existentialists avoid the naturalistic, empirical reading of this relation, and here they owe Husserl: experiences relate to things "intentionally", through meaning, not causally. They then move from "pure" to existential phenomenology: Heidegger holds cognition "presupposes existence"; Merleau-Ponty puts meaning in bodily "operative intentionality".
To the objection that we can still ascend to an "absolute", detached scientific account, existentialists reply with Husserl and Nietzsche that science is "all-too-human", inspired by "a will to order the whole of nature" (Scheler) and a "fixed ground-plan" (Heidegger). Science is not rejected; scientism is. Positively, the world is like a language: a "referential totality" (Heidegger), "a cradle of meanings" (Merleau-Ponty), in which we are at home as native speakers. Values are not added afterwards: we never meet a "naked" object and "stick a value on it". So the charge of subjectivism about values fails: values are no more human-dependent than anything else.
2.4 Freedom, Angst and authenticity
The social character of the human world seems to threaten individual freedom; John Macquarrie asks how communal existence can be reconciled with individualism. Existentialists face this directly: individuals live under the "dictatorship" of "the public" (Kierkegaard), "the herd" (Nietzsche), "mass-existence" (Jaspers) and Heidegger's "They" (das Man), which "prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness". This absorption is no historical accident but a condition of understanding a world at all.
Angst (best left untranslated) answers both questions: it intimates our freedom and explains why we act as if unfree. Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom" becomes Sartre's "vertigo" (not fear of falling but the thought that nothing stops me jumping), an awareness that one can always "disengage". In Heidegger's account the world turns "uncanny", things "sink away", and "Angst individualizes". Jaspers places it in "boundary situations", above all mortality; resolute anticipation of death also individualizes. Sartre's absurdity (unlike Camus's longing for reason, or Beauvoir's dangling moments) adds a tension between serious commitment and its "unjustifiability".
How the existentialist moods reveal freedom and individualize.
People flee these uncheerful moods, which is flight from freedom, not its absence. Authenticity means retrieving one's "ownmost possibility" from the They, a "self-recovery" requiring "inner resistance" (Jaspers); Heidegger adds that mature Angst brings "unshakable joy". Few followed Sartre's "initial choice"; most agreed with Marcel that it is a "fatal error" to equate freedom and choice. Freedom means, with Merleau-Ponty, being "open to the world", with powers of refusal and to "begin something else". The considered existentialist is not the hero of actes gratuits but someone who stands back, considers, and decides, accepting responsibility.
2.5 Being with others
Here the debt is to Fichte and Hegel: "the human being becomes a human being only among other human beings". Self-consciousness needs mutual recognition, so there is no problem of "other minds": Heidegger's Dasein is "essentially Being-with"; Sartre's other is met in the Look ("behold now I am somebody").
The nihilistic reading of existentialist ethics fits the cultural movement better than the philosophers. Their animus against rules (Kierkegaard: acting "on principle" can "avoid all personal responsibility") is not rejection of moral concern; denying objective values is not emotivism; and Sartre's advice to the student ("You are free, so choose ... invent") shows only that one cannot impersonally decide between two well-grounded options. Hegel's master-slave shows recognition must come from those one respects; so freedom is reciprocal: Sartre, "my freedom impl[ies] mutual recognition of others' freedom"; Jaspers, "man becomes free only insofar as the other becomes free"; Marcel, to "collaborate with his freedom"; Heidegger, to free "the Other in his freedom for himself". Bad faith includes surrendering to how others stereotype us; Beauvoir's The Second Sex blames women too for living up to the male image.
2.6 Concluding remarks
Existentialism is a movement and has movement: from estrangement and the human world to radical freedom and an ethics of authenticity and reciprocal freedom, combining themes from Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson and Husserl.
Existence precedes essence, unpacked
Cooper's slogan work is careful. Sartre's "existence precedes essence" means that for human beings there is no prefabricated what-it-is that settles how to live; the for-itself is always ahead-of-itself (Heidegger's phrase), on the way to possibilities that awaken a present. "Exist" (ex-stare, stand out) names the capacity to step back from oneself and the fact that one is understandable only by reference to what one is not yet. Estrangement is not a mood fad: it is the felt gap between a human world of meanings and a nature that does not underwrite them.
The human world Cooper reconstructs is one of equipment, projects and others, not a container of objects plus minds. Freedom is not indifference; it is the burden of having to take a stand. Angst discloses that stands are ungrounded; authenticity is owning that disclosure rather than fleeing into the They. Being-with is original, not inferred: others are already there in the world's publicness, which is why bad faith and the Look can distort a field that was never private first.
What Cooper offers as the shared picture.
Family boundaries Cooper draws
Cooper's concluding remarks police the border of the family: shared theses about estrangement, the human world, Angst and authenticity, and being-with, without requiring a single system. Marcel's availability, Merleau-Ponty's bodily freedom, Jaspers's Existenz, Camus's absurd and Beauvoir's ambiguity sit with Heidegger and Sartre as family resemblance, not identity. Hegel's struggle for recognition and Fichte's summons appear as ancestors of being-with; Kierkegaard's present age diagnoses the crowd. The manifesto is therefore a checklist for reading later chapters: where Malpas, Schacht or Bernasconi stretch the family, they are arguing with Cooper, not ignoring him.
Cooper's center and the Companion's contested edges.
Existentialism as a Cultural Movement (William McBride)
3.1 Who or what is an existentialist
The epicenter was Paris, especially the Latin Quarter, just after the German Occupation. Both "existentialism" and "culture" have vague edges, so McBride starts with the post-war Paris scene. The term predates Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir; the first systematic technical use may be Gabriel Marcel's, but in the 1930s it already named Kierkegaard and Heidegger: Leon Shestov's Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (French, Paris 1936), Jaspers on "existential philosophy", Jean Wahl's history (1943). 1943 also brought Being and Nothingness, now paired with Being and Time (1927) as the systematic treatise, but Nausea (1938) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) had already made the label cultural.
A timeline of existentialism's cultural ascent and first fractures.
Camus called Jaspers, Shestov and Kierkegaard "existentials" whose "leap of faith" is philosophical suicide, an escape from the absurd (the lack of fit between reason's aspirations and the world). He failed to separate himself; the public linked him to existentialism anyway. Marcel, an existential thinker when the others were adolescents, came to resent a movement identified with Sartre; on 1 December 1945 in Les Lettres Françaises he said Sartre's existentialism was negative and his own Christian existentialism positive, which fed the standard split into theistic and atheistic versions. Sartre once told a Dominican colloquium he did not know what existentialism was, but he and Beauvoir soon adopted and defended it: Sartre's lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" (late October 1945, near-pandemonium) and Beauvoir's "Existentialism and the Wisdom of Nations" in the new Les Temps Modernes (1 December 1945), arguing that proverbial folk wisdom is pessimistic while existentialism is hope-filled.
Within a year of Liberation the word was familiar and already disputed. All four writers were better known for literature than philosophy, yet Being and Nothingness was treated as defining: Marcel called it diabolical; Claude-Edmonde Magny hailed it for breaking wartime insularity.
3.2 Disseminating existentialism
Three early reviews: Georges Izard in Argentina's Sur (August 1945) reported young French readers taking the book's difficulty as a challenge; William Barrett in Partisan Review called it "the Bible of French existentialism" while ranking Sartre's other work higher; A. J. Ayer grudgingly granted that its "metaphysical pessimism" suited the age. In 1946 Jean Wahl, asked outside a café whether he was an existentialist, said no, "because he hated vague generalities", and noted Sartre writing for Vogue, Mademoiselle covering existentialist literature, and Marvin Farber calling Heidegger "an international menace".
The US received an "existentialist offensive": Sartre came first as a reporter for Combat on a US-government-sponsored trip, then as lecturer; Beauvoir toured colleges. Life magazine described the Paris "caves", though translations came only from 1947-48 (Hazel Barnes's Being and Nothingness in 1956). By the mid 1960s the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy was large.
| Source of appeal | How it worked |
|---|---|
| End of the war | New enthusiasm for living plus a deeper sense of life's dark side |
| France's position | Occupation and Resistance (Camus active; Sartre, Beauvoir peripheral) but less physical damage than Germany |
| Desire for change | Old conventions felt untenable, even "absurd" |
| Unconventional lives | Authors and characters alike: Roquentin's chestnut root, Camus's Meursault (English 1946: The Outsider / The Stranger) |
Unconventionality drew denunciation from the Right: "diabolical" (Marcel), "satanic" (Jeanne Mercier, who said existentialism forgot an infant's smile), "luciferian" (Roger Troisfontaines SJ); the Protestant Walter Lowrie objected to one label for Kierkegaard and Sartre. The Second Sex provoked "an avalanche of bad faith", with François Mauriac writing that "we have literally reached the limits of the abject". The Communist Left (Henri Lefebvre, Georg Lukács) attacked it as bourgeois idealism; their fears were "well founded" from their viewpoint, since 1940s existentialism worked against Party dogma and looked apolitical.
3.3 The climate of existentialism
That appearance proved misleading. Three global facts coloured existentialist culture: the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and struggles against racism and colonialism. Nuclear menace made Angst resonate (from Kierkegaard and Heidegger more than the French; Sartre later told Benny Lévy he had never felt it), until "existential Angst" became a cliché. Beauvoir's The Mandarins captures the Cold War mood among intellectuals resembling the Temps Modernes circle, with Anne's affair mirroring Beauvoir's with Nelson Algren; Anne's self-description "résistentialiste" marks existentialism's political turn.
The three post-war facts McBride says shaped existentialism's cultural reception.
Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute dealt with Southern racism; Richard Wright moved to Paris in 1946. Indochina and Algeria brought further engagement: Sartre's preface "Black Orpheus" to Senghor's Negritude anthology, and his militant preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Politics drove the quarrels. Camus (a child of colons, killed in a car accident in January 1960) hoped for a French-Algerian reconciliation; after The Rebel (1951), Francis Jeanson's hostile review and Camus's formal reply to "Monsieur le Directeur" ended the friendship; Sartre's answer began "Our friendship was not easy, but I will miss it" (August 1952). A year later Merleau-Ponty broke with Sartre over a unilateral editorial decision against the background of Korea: Merleau-Ponty, whose Humanism and Terror had seemed to excuse the Moscow trials, now saw Communist aggression; Sartre blamed American provocation. Their collaboration ended in spring 1953.
3.4 Associating with existentialism
Sartre's What is Literature? (1947) says prose (not poetry) must be engagée, rejecting "art for art's sake". Influence ran both ways: Heidegger drew on Hölderlin ("Poetically Man Dwells"); Dostoevsky and Kafka form an existentialist literature avant la lettre. Associated figures are "legion": theater of the absurd (Ionesco, Beckett), Genet (Sartre's Saint Genet), Pinter, Albee, Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, Wright, Hemingway, the Beats. Two 1980s books show how loose "association" became: one links Borges to existentialism while admitting neither his work nor his critics acknowledge it; another, from a conference in Delhi, warns against loose use and then finds existentialism in Eugene O'Neill.
Film: the New Wave from Godard's Breathless (dated 1960 here), Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal), Antonioni, de Sica, Woody Allen; Thomas Wartenberg lists some seventy films. Sartre wrote an 800-page Freud screenplay for John Huston, then had his name removed; Freud, the Secret Passion was a modest success. Music: only jazz (Sartre played piano, met Charlie Parker, ended Nausea with a jazz record, wrote "Nick's Bar, New York City"). Painting: Sartre on Masson, Giacometti, Picasso, Wols; Merleau-Ponty's "Cézanne's Doubt"; Abstract Expressionism and Pollock; Alfred Barr presented the government-funded "New American Painting" as anxious and committed only in their work, "not politically engagés". Religion: Shestov and Berdyaev; Kierkegaard's mark on Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Tillich (The Courage to Be), Niebuhr, Ricoeur, and the Jewish thinker Buber. Psychoanalysis: Sartre's "existential psychoanalysis"
3.5 Conclusion
Colin Wilson's The Outsider (1956), an overnight success, is "not outstanding by virtue of its accuracy" (he writes that "Sartre and Wells have decided that man is never free"), but shows existentialism had become nearly synonymous with protest against the scientific-technical order. Fifty-two years later Bernard Murchland's The Arrow That Flies by Day finds existential thrust from Socrates to Hannah Arendt, the Stoics, Augustine, Rousseau, Thoreau and James. The "espèce d'existentialiste" lives on.
French epicenter and the American reception
William McBride treats existentialism as a cultural movement with a French center of gravity after the Occupation. Shestov's Kierkegaard, the 1943 publication of Being and Nothingness, Sartre's 1945 Club Maintenant talk, Beauvoir and Marcel in the same season, then US tours and translations: the timeline is cultural as much as doctrinal. Les Temps modernes, café life, and the press's caricature of black turtlenecks belong to the same story as the books.
The post-war climate McBride stresses has three facts: the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and the exposure of racism and colonialism. Engagement becomes the public face; the 1950s quarrels (Sartre/Camus, Sartre/Merleau-Ponty, fights with the Communist left and with Catholic critics) are cultural events, not only journal disputes. American reception runs through universities, Partisan Review-style magazines, and popularizers; McBride notes how the label both spread and thinned as it crossed the Atlantic.
McBride's cultural map of the movement's peak.
Engagement as a cultural form
McBride's mid-century portrait: Les Temps modernes, Club Maintenant, the US lecture circuit, and the press's cartoon existentialist are one movement. The atomic bomb, Cold War, and the exposure of racism and colonialism are not background scenery; they are why engagement became the public face of a philosophy of freedom. Quarrels with Camus, Merleau-Ponty, the PCF and Catholic critics are reception events that fixed the brand even as they split the friends. When the fashion thinned, the problems (commitment under history, writing as act) remained for later chapters to rework.
McBride's cultural arc of the movement's peak and after.
What the fashion fixed and distorted
McBride's cultural history explains why later analytic readers met a cartoon: turtlenecks, despair posters, "existence precedes essence" on a tote bag. The fashion fixed a public language for anguish and engagement under bomb and empire; it also distorted the arguments Cooper and Crowell restore. Use McBride to date when a slogan entered the press; use the philosopher chapters to see what the slogan flattened. The Companion's bet is that after the fashion died, the problems did not.
Why a cultural chapter belongs here.
Kierkegaard's Single Individual and the Point of Indirect Communication (Alastair Hannay)
4.1 The single individual
Kierkegaard wrote that any historical importance of his writings would come from his "category of the single individual", a discovery "his" not by evidence or deduction but through personal experience. Only after four and a half years of writing, ending with Concluding Unscientific Postscript, did he call it a category. In the pseudonymous works the individual was first tied to exceptionality, which suggests failing to fit a category. Abraham in Fear and Trembling focuses the dilemma: a "suspension of the ethical" and a failure to "realize the universal", a theme first raised by the ethicist Assessor Wilhelm in Part Two of Either/Or. As the works develop, higher demands than conventional ethics emerge, and the reasons for failing the universal only appear to lie beyond our control.
The focus had autobiographical roots: the broken engagement to Regine Olsen. The psychologizer can read the early pseudonyms as self-exculpation, with religion as a ready Lutheran device and a "Guidance" that steered him. Skeptics (Hannay cites Garff) treat Kierkegaard's later religious self-interpretation as stage-management; Hannay leaves judgment to the reader. Some self-references are certainly accurate: "my reader" in the dedication of the first two edifying discourses (May 1843, same date as Either/Or, signed) was Regine. The single reader returns at the end of the Postscript in a "systematic" frame.
How the exception became a category, as Hannay reconstructs Kierkegaard's development.
Pseudonymity blocks the autobiographical source and lets the works live their own lives, while the signed edifying discourses became his religious voice to church members "one by one". The ironic pseudonyms went out "to get a hold on the public", fostering a need he felt himself, to become a singular individual, and so to scatter the public into individuals "separated out" (A Literary Review). To keep his own need hidden he kept up a façade as an idler, later explained as required by "indirect communication".
Before the Postscript he provoked a feud with the satirical paper The Corsair; its ridicule (about six months) ended his cover and pressed him into the "solitude of his own singularity". Either/Or had already described an exceptionality that accepts its fate at a high price, with no redress: we should not forgive a Gauguin for deserting his family because of his art. Wilhelm glimpsed a way out, a personal choice that transforms a finite particular into the universal, calling this noble exceptionality "a purgatory". After the Postscript Kierkegaard saw a divine hand, like Socrates' daimon, behind his work, thought of martyrdom for truth, and reread all his production as a continuous religious campaign, a mission against the "presumptuous" Christianity of "Christendom". Hannay finds a "narrative logic" in this progression even without the guiding hand.
4.2 Indirect communication
Pseudonymity is neither simply a mask for a "ghostly manipulator" nor merely a joke; it may license more self-revelation than convention allows. Some read the Postscript, by the "humorist" Johannes Climacus, as parody; Kierkegaard said it "is made to appear comical" precisely because "it is serious". Two questions arise: is indirect communication tied only to becoming a Christian, or to "existential" thinking generally; and is the Postscript itself indirect?
Telling a stranger the time ("three minutes to three") is not even direct communication, since nothing of one's own is imparted (Danish meddelelse, sharing). Direct communication belongs to "immediacy": mutual dependence, beliefs and concerns, including attitudes like sadness that we all understand. It diverts from "the eternal" in oneself. Indirect communication is needed when we transcend what can be said in the shared language of facts and concerns, beyond Wittgenstein's "all that is the case" and beyond Heideggerian Sorge.
Direct versus indirect communication in the Postscript.
Socrates "took note of the fact that there is no direct relation between the teacher and the learner, because inwardness is truth". The lesson must take root spontaneously, independent of the teacher's belief, and being separated out is part of what is taught: no teacher or authority to lean on. A Heideggerian reading (the They versus authentic being-toward-death) is tempting, but Heidegger said his analysis "proposes no covert theology", while the Postscript is theological. Climacus also has an un-Socratic element: Socrates' truth lies "behind" in recollection (the slave boy in the Meno), whereas Christian truth lies in the future, with the individual's becoming constitutive of it.
Indirect communication is needed when "inwardness" is communicated. The lover appropriating love's inwardness "has no result"; poems emerge from love rather than describing it. Kierkegaard called his indirect method "instinctive": something higher was "brewing" in him, unlike Newton publishing results; he did not even know whether it was truth. The recipient too gets no result, and that is part of the message: "the method being the very message".
| Reading of the pseudonyms | Claim | Problem or support |
|---|---|---|
| One center ahead (Hannay's preference) | Works gravitate toward religiousness B; a life-view lies ahead of them | Fits Kierkegaard's later self-appraisal; echoes his Andersen review on "centers of gravity" |
| Separate centers (MacIntyre) | Life-views are selected by radical choice | Choice "strained beyond recognition": reduces choosing to picking |
| Author-free text (Concept of Irony) | Mastered irony frees the work from its author | Then the communication is not even "indirect"; Kierkegaard says it "demands a communicator" |
The stages (aesthetic, ethical, religious, ending in the paradox of religiousness B) gravitate toward Christianity, which Climacus calls not a doctrine but an "existence-communication". In an unfinished lecture series, "The Dialectic of Ethical and the Religio-Ethical Communication", Kierkegaard lists four elements: the object, the imparter, the recipient, and what is imparted; the text is absent. The topic drops out where an ability is imparted, and absence of topic correlates with indirectness. So the indirect communicator must contribute some "brewing" vision of truth. Climacus calls this "double reflection": the existing subject, isolated in inwardness, wants to convey something personal, a contradiction that cannot find direct expression. Ordinary indirectness (political signals, innuendo, irony) needs only shared language; the "life of eternity" has none, and clothing it in one makes it "presumptuous and a fake".
Kierkegaard says his pseudonyms "represent" indirect communication: the pseudonymous authors communicate indirectly, not Kierkegaard through pseudonymity. He says he abandoned indirect communication after the Postscript, so The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity, though pseudonymous (Anti-Climacus), are not indirect. At the end Climacus revokes the Postscript, often compared to Wittgenstein's ladder. The distance is that of humor, not maieutics; indirect communication also means "taking away", ridding us of pictures that hold us captive. Climacus resembles a talk-show host who lets the audience laugh at Christianity's absurd narrative but chiefly at those who think reason has conquered it. Since "humor revokes existence", revoking the humor returns the reader to existence.
4.3 The religious respect
Sartre's "The Singular Universal" concludes "we cannot revive the martyr of inwardness"; what lives is the writer who treated anxiety, doubt, faith, guilt and immortality existentially, and who revealed "each man is all mankind as the singular universal". Hannay notes an ambiguity: if singular universality appears only once contingent stances are filtered away, Sartre's atheism is just another case history, yet he claims an "authentic" version for it. Kierkegaard's category could be read as an application of the singular universal, with enough existential ontology in the Postscript, its talk of religiousness rather than religion perhaps a valid amendment.
Hannay's assessment of Dreyfus's generalization (see Chapter 5).
Hubert Dreyfus (Chapter 5) generalizes the God-man into an all-risks commitment to "something finite", realizing Wilhelm's wish without absurdity. But without the "offense" to reason most of what Climacus and Anti-Climacus say "falls flat", and the link to love becomes contingent, "a contingency too far" for readers who see Works of Love as central. Stephen Mulhall shows Climacus joins authenticity and wholeness exactly as Heidegger does. Still, what grounds a goal of authenticity? If it means keeping our confinement to immediacy in view, "Why should we do that?" Science's omission of subjectivity is no reason; prudence is not ethics (we find out what is prudent in order "not to do it"); the human as the species whose specimen is "more than the species" remains "structure". To say what we ought to become we need teleology, "a part of Aristotelian metaphysics that won't so easily go away".
Sartre charges that Kierkegaard "shows historiality, but misses history", turning a parochial story into the only authentic one, and calls him "my adventure". Hannay restores balance: against Sartre's claim that we make our own worlds, the young Kierkegaard described the world as a gift and a task that comes to us.
Why Socrates is not enough
Hannay unravels Climacus's praise of Socrates. Teaching that brings something out in the pupil, and ethics that is not mere mores, need distance and inwardness. Yet Socrates is also, for Climacus, a precursor of recollection metaphysics: truth is already "behind" the learner. Christian becoming, by contrast, has the truth ahead, in a paradox that cannot be recollected. That is why indirect communication is not a literary flourish but the only method that leaves the learner alone with the absolute.
The Regine break, the Corsair feud, and the late attack on Christendom are Hannay's biographical hinges for how the exception became a category: the single individual who fails the universal and must be addressed without results that can be pocketed as doctrine. Heidegger's structures of Dasein, Hannay notes, "propose no covert theology"; the Postscript's topic (how to become a Christian) does. So the analogy with Heidegger's authenticity only goes so far.
Hannay wedge: Socratic vs Christian communication.
Religious respect and offense
Hannay's third movement: without offense there is no basis for Christian indirect communication (Anti-Climacus, Practice in Christianity). Every human who gives heed to himself "knows what no science knows, since he knows who he himself is" (Concept of Anxiety). Sartre's "singular universal" essay is Hannay's late foil: Kierkegaard remains the thinker for whom the exception is a category, not a pathology. The Point of View and the journals show authorship as a strategy aimed at the single individual, potentially "more" than a generation of readers. Religious respect here means refusing to translate faith into a result the crowd can administer.
Hannay's religious respect sequence.
"What a Monster Then Is Man": Pascal and Kierkegaard on Being a Contradictory Self (Hubert L. Dreyfus)
5.1 Two traditions of the self
Kierkegaard's definition runs: "The self is a relation which relates to itself ... A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of possibility and necessity, of the eternal and the temporal ... Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self." A self relating to itself must either have established itself or been established by something else; the human self relates to itself "and in relating to itself relates to something else". (Dreyfus, with Jane Rubin, modifies Hannay's translation: Lowrie's "factors" for "terms", "possibility" for "freedom", and a reordered list.)
The West holds two opposed understandings. From the Greeks, especially Plato: detached reflection discovers timeless universal truths; perception, skill, emotion, body and tradition get in the way; nothing radically new happens in time; the best life leaves the cave and becomes a "friend of god". From the Hebrews: truth as commitment to a particular covenant at a particular time; everything important happens in time (creation, covenant, commandments, Incarnation); and radical rebirth is possible. On the Greek view the self has two independent aspects, and life is a voyage from conflict to harmony once you see which set of factors is essential: Plato's eternal soul stuck in a body, or Lucretius's material soul with religious imaginings.
| Greek (Plato) | Hebrew / Christian | |
|---|---|---|
| Truth | Universal, timeless, found by detachment | Commitment to a particular covenant |
| Time | Nothing radically new; endless repetition | Everything important happens in time |
| Self | A combination; one set of factors essential | A synthesis; both sets essential |
| Fulfilment | Detached contemplation, become eternal | Total commitment; rebirth as "a new creation" |
5.2 Pascal discovers the contradictory self
Stoics, Augustinians, Cartesians and idealists backed the soul; Epicureans and Hobbes the body. Pascal saw the two traditions conflict: "the God of Abraham and Isaac was not the God of the philosophers". For the Judeo-Christian tradition both sets are essential, so the self is a synthesis and "an agonized contradiction": "What a monster then is man! What a novelty, what a portent, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy!" The highest achievement is to express the tension: "We do not display greatness by going to one extreme, but in touching both extremes at once." Kierkegaard calls this relation dialectical: each set requires the other, yet one cannot satisfy both on one's own, so the self is in despair even when it doesn't know it.
Kierkegaard's definition of the self, redrawn from Dreyfus's Figure 5.1: three levels of relation.
5.3 Despairing ways of attempting to be a self
Despair has three forms: "being unconscious of the despair of having a self (inauthentic despair), desperately not willing to be oneself, and despairingly willing to be oneself."
- Spiritlessness. One covers up the contradiction with Pascal's diversion: billiards, hunting, dancing, squash, or "sweating over a problem in algebra". For Kierkegaard the chief diversion was the public sphere and the press, where one debates principles without testing them; Dreyfus adds that it is now "consummated in blogs".
- The negative relation. The relation is a "negative unity": deny one set and act as if only the other were essential (Plato's body as tomb, Lucretius's psychology of religion).
- The positive relation. Try on one's own to express both sets fully. Making possibility absolute gives the aesthetic sphere (Kierkegaard's anticipation of Nietzsche and the postmoderns) and loses continuity; making the infinite absolute loses the finite, like mystics who cannot connect their God-relationship to "a walk in the park".
Across the aesthetic, ethical and mystical/religious spheres, "the self cannot by itself arrive at or remain in equilibrium and rest".
5.4 Despair: the sickness unto death
You may feel you are not in despair at all, enjoying possibilities, doing your duty, reducing suffering. Kierkegaard replies that despair "differs dialectically" from sickness: when it appears, "it is immediately evident that he has been in despair his whole life". Unlike sadness, regret or depression, despair has "the dialectic of eternity": the sense that, given who you are, a life worth living is impossible, so past joys "must have been self-deceptions". Hence all of us who have not faced despair and been healed are in despair now. The ultimate despair denies the demand to unite the factors, like Richard Rorty, who would drop the Judeo-Christian vocabulary as unhealthy. Kierkegaard thinks the dispute can only be approached existentially, by an exhaustive categorization of failed ways of relating.
5.5 How the factors reinforce each other in an unconditional commitment
"The possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over the beast; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian's advantage over natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian's blessedness." The formula for the cured self: "in relating to itself and in willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it." Whether the factors can balance depends on how they are defined: detachment cannot unite them; only an involvement total enough to give identity can.
Fear and Trembling supplies the model: Abraham's identity lay in Isaac, and the case on which "everything turns" is the young lad whose whole life lies in love for a princess; "any other interest whatever in which an individual concentrates the whole of life's reality" would do. Dreyfus's examples: the knight and his lady, Martin Luther King Jr. and justice, Steve Jobs and Apple. Responding to such a call, one is reborn as "a new creation".
How each pair of factors is satisfied by a defining commitment.
- Temporal and eternal. The moment of rebirth, the Augenblick ("twinkling of an eye"), becomes absolutely important, and other moments gain significance from it. Identity becomes "eternity in time": the knight could forget, but it is "a contradiction to forget the whole of one's life's content and still be the same". "I become for the first time eternal only in existence."
- Finite and infinite. The passion is infinite because it opens a world: anything that could exist gets its meaning from it. Its object is finite and vulnerable, which makes it risky; an abstract idea such as the triumph of the proletariat is safer but not concrete enough. "Without risk, no faith."
- Necessary and possible. Identity is necessary but not a compulsion; one adapts to changes in the world. A more radical freedom changes worlds, being "born again and again": Abraham trusted God "could give him a new Isaac", since God is "that everything is possible". One changes worlds only by total involvement in one until it breaks down and a new world arrives by a discontinuous leap, a gestalt switch.
5.6 Conclusion
Only a religion of infinite passion for something finite gives both sets equal weight. But by the logic of the position the object need not be the God-man: the Postscript speaks of relating to something "in such a way that his relation is truly a God relation". The lower-case "power" that establishes the self is whatever finite object gives it identity; Jesus is the first such object, who revealed that both factor-sets are essential. The power that established the whole relation is God understood as "that everything is possible", which makes the impossible synthesis possible.
Diversion, then and now
Pascal's diversions (billiards, hunting, dancing, algebra sweated alone) and Kierkegaard's (the public sphere, debating principles without risk) are Dreyfus's bridge to the present: blogs and feeds as perfected irresponsibility. Acting only as a combination of factors is not yet being a self. The relation must relate itself to itself by taking a stand that makes something absolute. Negative unity (the factors merely held together) is not enough; unconditional commitment is the positive form in which infinite/finite, eternal/temporal, and possibility/necessity stop tearing the self apart and start reinforcing one another.
Dreyfus's path from the contradictory self to a defining commitment.
Two traditions of the self
Dreyfus opens by contrasting a substance tradition (self as thing with properties) with a relational tradition Pascal and Kierkegaard radicalize. Pascal's Memorial is a defining reorientation; Kierkegaard's despair taxonomy (Sickness unto Death) shows forms of not wanting to be oneself and wanting to be oneself despairingly. Unconditional commitment is how the contradictory factors reinforce rather than tear. The public sphere as diversion is Kierkegaard's media theory: principles debated without risk. That is why Dreyfus can update the diagnosis to blogs without changing the structure.
Dreyfus's fork before Pascal and Kierkegaard are read together.
Nietzsche: After the Death of God (Richard Schacht)
6.1 Existentialism, existential philosophy and Existenz-philosophy
Kierkegaard virtually defined the program with his charge that modern philosophy (Hegel) had forgotten "what it means to be a human being ... each one for himself". The gulf with Nietzsche is wide: Nietzsche's reinterpretation follows the "death" of Kierkegaard's God and disparages the leap of faith, and he scorns "everything subjective and its wretched ipsissimosity" (BGE 207). Defined by what Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre share, "existentialism" means little; defined by everything they think, it is incoherent. Sartre complained as early as 1947 that the word "has come to mean nothing at all". Schacht separates three terms, plus a rival.
| Term | Meaning | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Existentialism | A picture: "home alone" in a godless universe; no absolutes; life absurd, yet radical freedom, responsibility and authenticity give the only non-illusory meaning | Sartre, Camus and literary kin |
| Existenz-philosophy | Defined by its topic: analysis or elucidation of human Existenz, assumed real, fundamental and key; distinguishes superior and inferior ways to exist | Kierkegaard, Jaspers (elucidate); Heidegger, Sartre (analyze) |
| Existential philosophy | An approach: existential phenomenology or evocative literary language, held to be privileged for human reality | Phenomenology after Husserl; existential literature |
| Philosophical anthropology (rival) | Human reality as a form of life; first-person perspectives need supplementing by biology, society, history, psychology | Rejected by Heidegger; joined by the later Sartre (Search for a Method) |
Schacht quotes Monty Python's "Bright Side" song for the existentialist picture: "Life is quite absurd, and death's the final word." Kierkegaard knew this as an extreme form of despair; Heidegger and Jaspers rejected it and the label. Existenz-philosophers all rank ways of existing: Kierkegaard's types of subjectivity, Heidegger's authentic/inauthentic, Jaspers's genuine Existenz, Sartre's bad faith versus integrity. The twin origins of Existenz-philosophy, Kierkegaard's Christian self and Husserl's anti-naturalist neo-Cartesian phenomenology, were both repugnant to him; yet he was "something like the catalyst" for their unlikely pairing.
Schacht's picture of how Existenz-philosophy was born.
6.2 "The death of God"
Nietzsche's thought tries to grant Schopenhauer's assessment of the human condition while being as affirmative of life as Schopenhauer was negative. He announced God's death matter-of-factly at the start of Book III of The Gay Science (1882): "After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave ... God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown" (GS 108). The shadow is the God-idea's influence on our interpretations; the Madman (GS 125) shows how traumatic the event could be; Zarathustra (1883-85) starts from it. In Book V (1887) the shadow becomes ominous: belief in the Christian god has become "unworthy of belief", and "the whole of our European morality" must collapse with it (GS 343).
How to dispose of God? "Why atheism today?" "'The father' in God has been thoroughly refuted; ditto, 'the judge,' 'the rewarder'" (BGE 53). In Daybreak (1881) Nietzsche says atheists once could not "clear the table"; now one shows "how the belief that there is a God could arise", so a counter-proof "becomes superfluous" (D 95). If God were "the vanity, the lust for power, the impatience, the terror ... of men" (D 93), the idea is subverted rather than refuted. The real task is to reckon with its consequences.
6.3 The advent and overcoming of nihilism
Nihilism is the "rebound from 'God is truth' to the fanatical faith 'All is false'". Rejecting transcendent absolutes can be healthy, but generalized it becomes "a pathological transitional stage": "what is pathological is the tremendous generalization, the inference that there is no meaning at all" (WP 13). The Genealogy (1887) ends with the man of the future who will redeem us from "the great nausea, the will to nothingness", "this Antichrist and anti-nihilist". Nihilism is a withdrawal symptom from addiction to absolutes: "A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist."
Schacht's reconstruction of Nietzsche's route from the death of God past nihilism.
The cure resembles his disposal of God: free ourselves from the false "God or bust" dichotomy, then give truth and value a new footing in this life: the meaning of life, beyond self-renewal, is its own enhancement and enrichment. A genuine philosopher "demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No ... about life and the value of life" (BGE 205), an expression of basic disposition. Schopenhauer said No; overcoming nihilism means a deep Yes, learning to love life as it is. A healthy creature "being alive, loves life" (BGE 24); for us, "learning to love" is most needful (GS 334); and eternal recurrence tests it: "how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?" (GS 341). Meaning comes from enhancement (Erhöhung), symbolized by the Übermensch: "The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth ... remain faithful to the earth" (Z I:P:3), a direction rather than a specific type.
6.4 A "philosophy of the future"
Beyond Good and Evil ("Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future") is to be post-religious, post-metaphysical, post-nihilist and post-moral, purged of good-versus-evil moralism. Its twin tasks are interpretation and evaluation (with reinterpretation and revaluation), pursued experimentally, perspectivally, and genealogically: "everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths" (HATH I:2). Historical philosophy "can no longer be separated from natural science" (HATH I:1): "we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators... up with physics! And even more so ... our intellectual integrity!" (GS 335). Yet a "scientific" interpretation resting on mechanics alone would be "a crudity and naiveté, if not a lunacy", as a purely scientific assessment of music would show (GS 373).
6.5 Nietzsche's "naturalism"
After God's death come a "de-deification of nature" and the call to "naturalize our human selves" (GS 109), illustrated by sections on the origin of knowledge, logic, science, humanity and morality. Human reality is originally animal life, and all it has become arose by mundane processes: "Body am I entirely, and nothing else" (Z I:4); "we have placed him back among the animals" (A 14). Morality and religion have "natural histories" though they furthered our "de-animalization"; the task is "to translate man back into nature" (BGE 230). The Genealogy traces breeding the beast of prey into "a household pet", making man "calculable" by the "social straitjacket", breeding "an animal that may promise", and the "internalization of man" through inhibited aggression, which produced the "soul".
6.6 Nietzsche's "aestheticism"
"Aestheticism" names the crowning role of creation, creativity and culture in his value theory, an outgrowth of value-naturalism, not a rival. The Birth of Tragedy (1872): "it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified"; art is "a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature"; the Apollinian and Dionysian burst forth "from nature herself"; "we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art". He later dropped "metaphysical" but kept value creation: "man becomes the transfigurer of existence when he learns to transfigure himself" (WP 820); "To 'give style' to one's character: a great and rare art!" (GS 290); "we want to be the poets of our lives" (GS 299); "We want to become those we are ... who give themselves laws, who create themselves" (GS 335).
"In man creature and creator are united: ... material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but ... also creator, form-giver, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity, and seventh day" (BGE 225). Higher humanity is the "union of spiritual superiority with well-being and an excess of strength" (WP 899), and it is cultural: "In place of 'society,' the culture-complex as my chief interest" (WP 462).
How Nietzsche's ideal of higher humanity developed.
Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) is his "aestheticist manifesto". It begins in existentialist style ("Be yourself! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself") but turns: "your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you". Man must redeem nature "from the curse of the life of the animal"; the philosophers, artists and saints (insight, creativity, self-mastery) lift us toward "the completion and fulfilment of nature". Our new duties set us in a community held together by "the fundamental idea of culture", and the individual life gains highest value "by consecration to culture". This was Wagner-inspired "great man" Romanticism that Nietzsche outgrew, but to the end the "highest power and splendor actually possible to the type man" (GM P:6) remained cultural: "What matters most always remains culture" (TI VII:4).
6.7 Nietzsche's Dionysianism
His this-worldly religiousness differs from Kierkegaard's Christianity and from the flat secularism of Sartre and Camus. Paul Tillich, in whose courses Schacht first met Nietzsche, called him an "ecstatic naturalist". "Divine" is a word for something about life and the world; hence "joy", "affirmation", "faithfulness to the earth", amor fati and eternal recurrence. "To stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence: my formula for this is amor fati" (WP 1041), a "Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection". Amor fati is the counterstroke to amor Dei. "Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems ... that is what I called Dionysian" (TI IX:4); this later Dionysianism absorbs the Apollinian, as his tragic sensibility.
Sensibility makes all the difference. In BT he asked how one who heard "the roaring desire for existence" could fail "at once to break"; by Human, All Too Human art had taught him to cry "life, however it may be, is good!" (HATH 222). "One must learn to love" (GS 334), now without BT's indispensable illusions. The world is "a work of art that gives birth to itself" (WP 796); "An anti-metaphysical view of the world, yes, but an artistic one" (WP 1048).
6.8 Conclusion
Unconventional, anti-Christian, anti-metaphysical and passionate thought does not make an existentialist (the same is true of Bertrand Russell), nor does being embraced by existentialists. Nietzsche's Dionysian aestheticism is either his alternative to or version of existentialism; his naturalistic, historical philosophical anthropology either alternative to or version of Existenz-philosophy; his genealogical-psychological fröhliche Wissenschaft either alternative to or version of existential philosophy. "If it too is to be considered a kind of existentialism ... so much the better, for them."
Naturalism, aestheticism, Dionysus
Schacht's Nietzsche is a catalyst of Existenz-philosophy more than a card-carrying existentialist. After the death of God and the advent of nihilism, the task is to relocate value in life's enhancement (Erhöhung), tested by the thought of eternal recurrence (GS 341): how well disposed would you have to become to crave this confirmation? "Learning to love" (GS 334) is needful where dispositions are concerned. Nietzsche's naturalism is not crude reduction; his aestheticism treats creation of values as art-like; his Dionysianism affirms life including destruction. Early Schopenhauer as Educator still serves genius (Wagner); later Zarathustra and Genealogy aim at the highest power of the type man. Culture, not private sincerity, is what matters most.
Where Schacht places Nietzsche.
Three isms that are not slogans
Schacht separates what readers conflate. Naturalism: relocate value inside life and drives without crude reduction to physics. Aestheticism: creating values is art-like; style and form matter to truthfulness. Dionysianism: affirm life including destruction, "going under," and the tragic. Philosophy of the future (BGE) and the free spirit's tasks after God's death are cultural programs, not private mood work. Notebooks gathered as The Will to Power are debated evidence for nihilism; Schacht warns against treating that compilation as a finished book. Early Schopenhauer as Educator still serves genius; later work aims at enhancing the type.
Schacht's three Nietzschean strands after God.
Nietzsche: Selfhood, Creativity, and Philosophy (Lawrence J. Hatab)
7.1 From metaphysics to naturalism
Modern science made nature mechanical and valueless, so value could only be housed in the subject, leaving a chasm between meaning and nature. Kierkegaard ("subjectivity is the truth") and Sartre ("existence precedes essence") reverse the priority of objectivity in matters of meaning and stress the self's radical freedom to choose. Nietzsche's approach to selfhood differs sharply.
"The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values" (BGE 2): constancy/change, eternity/time, reason/passion, good/evil, truth/appearance, grouped around being versus becoming. Being promises control over life's instability. Nietzsche does not simply reverse the scheme; he replaces exclusion with crossing (a term Hatab takes from Sallis): good things are "insidiously related" to their opposites; there are only "differences of degree" and "transitions" (WS 67), and even sheer becoming is visible only against an imagined world of being. The result is an existential naturalism: finite, unstable earthly existence becomes the measure of thought. It is not scientific naturalism, which sits on the "being" side; "the terrible basic text of nature must again be recognized" (BGE 230).
Hatab's route from Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics to existential naturalism.
The death of God means the demise of anti-natural thinking, and with it of every inference from theological grounds: "the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem" (GM III:27). We still trust God's "shadows" in secular moral and political constructs. The threat is nihilism: we have "unchained this earth from its sun" (GS 125), and "the highest values devalue themselves" (WP 2). "Either abolish your reverences or yourselves! The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be nihilism?" (GS 346). Nihilism is parasitic on the tradition: the world seems empty only because the old measures are still presumed the only ones. Philosophers should greet God's death with "gratitude and excitement".
Will to power is a counter-nihilistic rethinking: "The world viewed from inside ... would be 'will to power' and nothing else" (BGE 36). Becoming is relational, made of resistances; any affirmation negates some other. "Will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which resists it" (WP 656). If resistance were destroyed, power would evaporate: power is overcoming, not annihilating ("there is no annihilation in the sphere of spirit", WP 588), better rendered "will toward power". Knowledge, pleasure and survival are its epiphenomena; dissatisfaction is intrinsic to it, which is why happiness is no measure. Even pacifism, as an overcoming of violence, is will to power.
7.2 Psychology and perspectivism
"The path to fundamental problems" lies in psychology (BGE 23). Constructs of being arise from weakness, an aversion to life's negative conditions, "a symptom of the decline of life" (TI 3:6). Psychology becomes normative: no universal human nature, but types from weak to strong; "My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank" (WP 287). No thought is value-free: "The 'disinterested' action is an exceedingly interesting and interested action" (BGE 220). Knowledge is perspectival: "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'" (GM III:12), including conflicting perspectives; "Enchantment of the opposing point of view" (WP 470).
The question is not "What is the meaning of life?" but "Can there be meaning in life?", affirmable on its own terms. The wisest have judged life "no good" (TI 2:1); Nietzsche calls all such judgments nihilistic and seeks the affirmative revaluation of tragic existence: "Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth ... someday I wish only to be a Yes-sayer" (GS 276). This existential task underpins will to power, perspectivism and eternal recurrence, so his texts cannot be read as doctrines tested only by logic; he joins "in a decisive way" becoming and the value of existence (WP 1058).
7.3 Selfhood
Nietzsche rejects the unified, substantial, autonomous self standing behind its acts (BGE 19-21). Selfhood is performance: "there is no 'being' behind doing ... 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed" (GM I:13). Language's "grammatical habit" makes us posit an "I" (BGE 17); the self is "a multiplicity of subjects" (WP 490), an arena of drives. It is not chaos: mastery by "counter-cropping" drives yields a kind of freedom, but not for everyone: "Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong" (BGE 29). The exception furthers the species, the rule preserves it (GS 55), and the exception can never be the model for all. Freedom is relational, measured "according to the resistance that must be overcome" (TI 9:38): better to speak of strong and weak wills than free and unfree.
Two views of selfhood that Hatab contrasts.
Nietzsche's view of consciousness "could hardly be less Sartrean". Consciousness (reflective self-consciousness, a "mirror") is a late, weak development; "the whole of life would be possible without ... seeing itself in a mirror" (GS 354). It is an epiphenomenal expression of instinct, and social: "Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings"; "It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness." So self-reflection captures only "what is not individual but 'average'", while our actions are "incomparably personal, unique". Hatab's note cites developmental research on inner and private speech in support. Knowledge itself "fixes" becoming through language, an "error" that is necessary: "we cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language" (WP 522).
How then is creativity possible? Long communication yields "an excess of this strength and art of communication ... a capacity that ... now waits for an heir who might squander it" (GS 354): artists. Creativity needs the norm: "fetters" (HATH I:221), "dancing in chains" (WS 140), an individual interpretation of inherited schemes. "Convention is the condition of great art, not an obstacle" (WP 809); Nietzsche doubts "the modern rage for originality". The free spirit is "a relative concept" (HATH 225); creativity precedes individuality ("the individual is itself just the most recent creation", Z I:15); "a thought comes when 'it' wishes, and not when 'I' wish" (BGE 17).
| Common assumption | Nietzsche (per Hatab) |
|---|---|
| Self is a unified substance | Self is a contest of drives; a performance |
| Consciousness is our highest nature | Consciousness is late, weak, social, "average" |
| Freedom is universal | Freedom is relational and for the few |
| Creativity is pure originality | Creativity is "dancing in chains"; convention enables it |
| Meaning lies in the subject | Meaning lies in affirming life's limits ("world-experience") |
Reflection is "this entirely dismal thing" (GM II:3), yet philosophy needs it; Nietzsche reflects on what eludes reflection, life, like "a dog chasing its own tail". "We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers" (GM P:1); "To become what one is, presupposes that one not have the faintest notion what one is" (EH II:9).
7.4 Selfhood and meaning
Meaning that resists nihilism must incorporate limits met in the larger economy of life. The Übermensch is not a progressive higher type (Nietzsche repudiates that, EH III:1) but a structural concept: it is named "the meaning of the earth", not someone who affirms it. Überwinden can mean "getting over" something, like a cold: we must recover from the opposition of "human" and "world" (GS 346). Hatab calls this "world-experience": meaning fixed neither in subject nor object, a circulation of forces. "Stop feeling like such a fantastic ego! ... Go beyond 'me' and 'you'! Experience cosmically!" Creative experience, a release into powers beyond conscious intention, is the best analogy; a notebook calls the "luxurious surplus" of mankind the type for which "my parable ... is the word 'Übermensch'".
Hatab's structural reading of the Übermensch.
7.5 Selfhood and philosophical style
Every philosophy is "a personal confession", "an unconscious memoir" (BGE 6); ask what a claim tells us "about the man who makes it" (BGE 187). Demonstration gives way to interpretation, "introduction of meaning" rather than explanation, with deliberate contradictions as a strategy against oppositional thinking. Assessment shifts from "How can you prove X?" to "Why is X important to you?" ("What have I to do with refutations!", GM P:4). Good style is "the actual communication of an inner state" (EH II:4). His "I" and "we" imply a "you": hyperbole, aphorism and narrative presume active readers who "think for themselves"; he wants to be read "with doors left open" (D P:5), but he still takes forceful positions. Philosophy is not mere "self-creation": the higher philosopher has "the conscience for the overall development of mankind" (BGE 61), philosophers are "commanders and legislators" (BGE 211), and the aim of creativity is culture-creation.
No doer behind the deed
Hatab's Nietzsche rejects the modern substantive self. "There is no 'being' behind doing"; the doer is a fiction added to the deed (BGE 19-21). Selfhood is performance inside life forces, not a Sartrean for-itself at the center of every subject. Perspectivism and psychology replace metaphysics of being; creativity is not optional ornament but how valuation happens. The Übermensch is not a higher biological type but a structural demand: get over the human-versus-world split; become meaning of the earth. Philosophical style (aphorism, mask, music) is part of the argument, not packaging.
Hatab vs Sartrean selfhood- Sartre. Consciousness at the center; freedom for every subject. - Nietzsche (Hatab). Consciousness a late social net; freedom and creation for the few strong enough; no doer behind the deed. - Shared surface. Both reject a prefabricated essence; they part on who creates and whether consciousness is the hero.
Style as argument; Übermensch as demand
Hatab's closing stress: aphorism, mask and musical sentence are not decoration. Because there is no doer behind the deed, philosophy must show evaluation in motion. The Übermensch names a structural demand to get over the human-versus-world split and become "meaning of the earth", not a comic-book higher race. Creative individuals emerge inside life forces; they are not Sartrean subjects multiplied. Read with Schacht: Schacht relocates value after God; Hatab rebuilds selfhood and style so that relocation is livable without a substantial ego.
Hatab's path from metaphysics-critique to philosophical style.
Heidegger: The Existential Analytic of Dasein (William Blattner)
8.1 Heidegger's ontology in Being and Time
"The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence" (BT 67) inspired Sartre's "existence precedes essence". The essence lies in its "to-be" (Zu-sein), a gerundive: we have our being to be, as we have tasks to do. Who we are is determined by how we live, and how we live by how we are called upon to live, by ourselves. No essence precedes the life we lead. Sartre's paper-cutter has an essence realized by its maker; this picture derives from Heidegger's reconstruction of the Greek eidos "seen in advance" by the artisan. Modern science replaced essences with law-governedness (Boyle, via Cassirer and Ortega: nature is "the rule or system of rules"), close to Locke's "real" essence. Dasein has no essence of either kind.
Ortega y Gasset went too far: man is "infinitely plastic", "as you like". Blattner cannot be Meriwether Lewis (the role no longer exists), a pro baseball player (body), or a Swabian (born in California): world-history, physical attributes and personal history limit what we can be. Heidegger captures history through thrownness: Dasein is "delivered over" to its "There"; its being is factical, not factual. Facticity is how Dasein is determinate, already someone in particular.
Blattner's distinction between factual and factical determinations.
Physical attributes are subtler. Dasein can be taken as present-at-hand only by ignoring its existential constitution. Perishing ends any organism; demise is death "codetermined" by Dasein's kind of being: projects left unfinished, grief left behind. Likewise we are not just of some height but tall or short (we have stature), not just of a biological sex but masculine, feminine, transgender, gender-ambiguous. Factical determinations are not identical with factual ones, and may lack necessary brute bases, as when a transgender person is fully accepted in the target gender. Taken metaphysically, the claim that persons are not explained by bodies keeps running into further possible scientific explanations: stature is a socially constituted Fact, but perhaps explained by the bodies of a whole community. Kiefer Sutherland at 5 ft 8½ in is not "short", since "every year he saves the United States from a terrorist catastrophe".
Being-with: "The world of Dasein is a with-world" (BT 154-55); "Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even though no other is present-at-hand". Loneliness is a deficient mode of sharing a world; even being anti-social is a way of sharing one; a wholly asocial life would have no language, since language is a community's monitored standard of usage.
Heidegger's interest is ontological, not metaphysical. Dasein's being "is an issue" for it. Attunement (Stimmung; Blattner's "disposedness" for Befindlichkeit) discloses "that we are and have to-be" by making things matter. Fear has three parts, the in-the-face-of-which, the about-which, and the fearing; and "that which fear fears about is that very entity which is afraid", so only a being whose being matters to it can fear. Our being has a claim on us. The understanding projects onto possibilities, our for-the-sakes-of-which: I am a teacher and a father, and my day makes sense as an attempt to be them.
8.2 Heidegger's existentialism
Having its essence in existence poses a challenge, which Heidegger calls anxiety and death, in "primordial" senses distinct from the ordinary ones (as with "guilt"). In anxiety "what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away"; the "world" can offer nothing, nor can others. Since only the world can give content to self-understanding (resoluteness "discovers first what is factically possible"), in anxiety Dasein cannot understand itself: it is "uncanny", not at home. Understanding and disposedness are equi-originary: to "see" a possibility it must matter. Anxiety, in which entities are of "so little importance", "discloses Dasein as being-possible": only possible, no one in particular.
Blattner's reconstruction of the path from anxiety to authenticity.
Death is "the possibility of the simple impossibility of Dasein" (BT 294), yet "a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is" (BT 289). Blattner resolves the paradox: the impossibility is existential, the impossibility of self-understanding, which Dasein suffers in anxiety. "Thrownness into death reveals itself ... in the disposedness of anxiety." This is existential death, distinct from demise.
| Feature of death | Blattner's reading |
|---|---|
| Non-relational | All relations to others are undone because nothing matters; not "facing one's end alone" |
| Ownmost | A formal possibility one has whatever else is true; it assigns Dasein to its ownmost ability-to-be |
| Unsurpassable | Dasein cannot immunize itself; it is always possible |
| Certain | Not 100 percent probability, but always possible, so it can be "held for true" |
| Indefinite | Tied to no concrete factical configuration (unlike, say, parenthood) |
Death and anxiety show practically that Dasein has no essence. Blattner separates contingency from vulnerability. Contingency (Guignon: the "ultimate contingency" of public possibilities; Dreyfus and Rubin: "basic groundlessness and meaninglessness") is distressing only if one craves metaphysical grounding; otherwise one could shrug, à la Rorty. Vulnerability demands a new way of living. His brother-in-law's wedding-day joke ("you only get married once or twice") reflects a fact, roughly 45 percent of US marriages end in divorce, but acknowledging it sociologically differs from integrating it into how one lives the marriage.
One proposal: hold commitments loosely, ready to give them up. That fits gambits (a fad diet) and ambitions (politicians), but toward marriage, children and callings it suggests "an affective disorder rather than an existential achievement". The better proposal: awareness of vulnerability means being prepared to struggle for what matters; to "take a friendship for granted" is to fail to nurture it. The Anyone knows only the "general situation", is out of touch with threats, and also fails to notice when it is time to move on, when one's attunements have shifted and a commitment has "died". Moving on does not mean regarding commitments as "ultimately meaningless", pace Dreyfus and Rubin; it means acknowledging their dissipation.
The two sides of authentic responsiveness, and why no rule decides between them.
There is no rule: "On what is it to resolve? Only the resolution can give the answer" (BT 345). Resoluteness is openness to what the situation says, which requires wanting to understand it, "wanting to have a conscience". Conscience here is not moralizing but transcendental: being responsive to the normative demands (standards) of one's for-the-sakes-of-which, the target of norms called to live up to who one is (Blattner credits Crowell and Kukla). Self-constancy is neither an expressivist inner self (Taylor) nor rigid obedience to eternal laws: "Existentially, self-constancy signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness." Since "Dasein is its world existingly", listening to conscience and listening to the situation are the same thing. The norms inhere in the factical world, not in a Kantian categorical imperative or a Natural Law order.
Ontology before slogans
Blattner insists that Heidegger's existentialism is an ontology, not a lifestyle brief. Being and Time asks about the meaning of being by analyzing the being that asks, Dasein. Factual determinations (biological sex, objective height, organic perishing) are not the same as factical ones (gender, stature, the demise of a life). Who one is is a person, not a body counted as an object. Boyle, Cassirer, Locke and Kant appear as contrast cases for how modernity split nature from meaning; Meriwether Lewis-style exploration is Blattner's image for how Dasein is always already oriented in a meaningful world.
Anxiety, death, resoluteness
Anxiety is not fear of an object; it discloses that the world can offer nothing that finally secures self-understanding. Existential death is the possibility of the impossibility of any project, not mere demise. Authenticity is anticipatory resoluteness: seeing that vulnerability, struggling for commitments or releasing them when they have died, without a rule that decides which. Guignon, Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, and Rorty are named as Anglophone readers Blattner writes with and against.
Blattner's existential analytic in five moves.
Ownmost possibility and the Anyone
Blattner's close reading of Being and Time: anxiety discloses Dasein as being-possible and the "total insignificance of the world". Death is "a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is", not a future event on a calendar. To "hold death for true" is to be fully assigned to one's ownmost ability-to-be, facing one's end alone, stripping the illusions of the Anyone. Phenomenology here means letting show "that which shows itself in itself, the manifest", against both objectifying science and edifying slogans. Authenticity is therefore structural: a mode of taking over thrown possibilities, not a moral badge.
Blattner's contrast inside the analytic of death.
Facticity, gender, and the person
Blattner's opening wedge: factual predicates (biological sex, metric height, organic perishing) are not yet factical ones (gender, stature, the demise of a life one is living). Who one is is a person under practical identities, not a body counted as an object among objects. Boyle and the scientific revolution, Cassirer's symbolic forms, Locke and Kant on persons, appear as the modern backdrop that makes Heidegger's distinction necessary. Authenticity does not invent a new self from nowhere; it takes over thrown facticity without pretending the Anyone already settled what matters. Guignon, Dreyfus/Rubin and Rorty are the Anglophone interlocutors Blattner writes beside.
Ontology of self before lifestyle advice.
The Antinomy of Being: Heidegger's Critique of Humanism (Karsten Harries)
9.1 Three questions
Jean Beaufret wrote in November 1946 asking Heidegger to clarify his relation to Sartre's existentialism, with three questions: how to restore meaning to "humanism"; how ontology relates to ethics; how to keep philosophy's adventure without turning it into "an adventuress". The reply, dated November 23, was reworked and published in 1947 with "Plato's Doctrine of Truth", tellingly in Switzerland, in a series edited by his former student Ernesto Grassi. It was Heidegger's first postwar publication.
The context was grim. Heidegger had lost his Catholic faith before Being and Time; by 1933 his faith in philosophy, which let him turn briefly to Hitler; by 1936 his faith in Hitler (seen as an Aaron making a golden calf), turning him to Hölderlin's promise of homecoming. In spring 1946 he suffered a breakdown; French occupation authorities quartered families in his house and threatened his library; in December he learned he could not resume teaching. Meanwhile Sartre's lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" (October 29, 1945) had named Heidegger a fellow atheist existentialist. A French soldier, Frédéric de Towarnicki, had lent Heidegger Being and Nothingness, which seems to have impressed him; the two men met only in 1952.
Rather than wrap himself in the humanist mantle, Heidegger questioned every "ism", linking humanism to communism, National Socialism and the darkness of the age, while anticipating the charge that rejecting humanism means affirming inhumanity. His sketch of humanism is, Harries says, "only a caricature": Grassi argued for Italian humanism and Vico as a non-metaphysical alternative, and Gadamer opened Truth and Method with the humanist tradition. Heidegger also had to ask whether Being and Time invited the Sartrean misreading, and he presented the correction not as revision: "there has been no change of standpoint".
Heidegger's genealogy of humanism as metaphysics.
9.2 Heidegger's critique of humanism
"Plato's Doctrine of Truth" (from a 1930/31 course, first published by Grassi in 1942) reads the cave allegory as the change from truth as aletheia (disclosedness) to truth as correctness, measured by the Platonic idea. This begins both metaphysics and humanism. Every humanism presupposes an essence of man, the animal rationale, and seeks to bring humans closer to it, through morals, salvation of souls, creative powers, reason, civic sense or bodily cultivation. There can be a Christian humanism: man at the center without being the highest being. Grassi knew neither Plato nor Italian humanism quite fits this.
When the Plato essay first appeared, Alfred Rosenberg's office found its relativism incompatible with "German political humanism"; publication needed Mussolini's personal intervention through Grassi. The same charge, Harries notes, must be made by anyone who thinks humanism needs a firm foundation, Sartre included. Beaufret wanted new wine in an old vessel; for Heidegger the end of metaphysics breaks the vessel: the word "has lost its meaning" because metaphysics obstructs the question of Being.
9.3 and 9.4 Sartre's humanism
Being and Nothingness had itself accused Heidegger of an "anxiety to establish an ontological foundation for an Ethics with which he claims not to be concerned" and of reconciling humanism with "the religious sense of the transcendent". Harries thinks Sartre was right: Being and Time admits a "factical ideal of Dasein" beneath its ontology (GA2 411), calls readers to accept their guilty being in resoluteness, and so is also a fundamental ethics. Herman Philipse sees ethical foundationalism reaching its "final stage" there, moving from heteronomy to autonomy to unrestricted freedom, though this fits Sartre better. Sartre does not share Heidegger's anguish: values are maintained by my own transcendence, and human reality "decides to define its own being by its ends".
Yet in Existentialism is a Humanism Sartre gives authenticity a Kantian twist: in choosing, I am "a legislator choosing at the same time what humanity as a whole should be"; one should always ask "What if everyone did what I am doing?" This sits awkwardly with his rejection of a universal concept "man" and his complaint that Kant's universality covers forest dwellers and the bourgeois alike. Sartre says freedom wills only itself, yet also that "freedom wills itself and the freedom of others"; Anthony Manser finds this "very similar" to the categorical imperative. Sartre fills the gap with free commitment while staying answerable to the universal; he remains faithful to Enlightenment humanism.
| Question | Sartre (1945-46) | Heidegger ("Letter", 1946) |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | The cogito: "I think therefore I am" | None; the antinomy of Being denies one |
| Death of God | Empowering; man abandoned and free | Suffered as loss of all measure |
| Ethics | Freedom willing the freedom of others | Dwelling in the truth of Being |
| History | Situation, but not what casts us into it | Homelessness as the destiny of Being |
| Humanism | Claimed openly | Rejected in name, kept as care for humanitas |
9.5 The death of God
For those who matured in post-1918 Germany, Nietzsche diagnosed a nihilism that Bildung could not cure. Heidegger endorsed the death of God, "anxiously, and ominously", in the Rectorial Address; unlike Sartre, he suffered it (he had once hoped to be a theologian). Nietzsche blames our Promethean will to power; Heidegger speaks of the progress of metaphysics seeking mastery of nature, including our own. Descartes and Kant thought freedom perfects itself by binding itself to reason; but Kierkegaard's solitary individual can ask "why be moral?" Heidegger was such an individual, unable to accept the categorical imperative as a human absolute; that leaves the subject's radical freedom as the only source of value, a lesson Sartre may have learned early through Kuki Shuzo.
9.6 The Kehre reconsidered
The Letter seems to call us first to silence: man "must first learn to exist in the nameless" and let himself be claimed by Being. In Being and Time the only example of authentic discourse was the wordless call of conscience; now the call comes from Being. Being and Time remained a fragment because its goal was impossible within transcendental metaphysics. Heidegger does not deny the book ended in a "blind alley" (Sackgasse), but later calls his path a Holzweg, a foresters' track that ends in a clearing (Lichtung). Losing one's way, Greek aporia, is the beginning of thinking.
The antinomy Harries finds beneath the Kehre.
9.7 and 9.8 The end of philosophy, and humanism after all
Sartrean readers may compare the Kehre to Nietzsche's remark on Wagner, who struck the reef of Schopenhauer and reinterpreted the shipwreck as the goal. Heidegger too once believed in revolution; did he reinterpret his reef as the clearing? He hoped the holy might dawn again, and told Der Spiegel "Only a god can still save us". Harries resists this reading: the Kehre is demanded by the understanding of Being already in Being and Time, not by the political disaster. Sartre's appropriation was always a misreading: he rejects being-toward-death as the key to the self and starts from the cogito. He does not ask what casts us into our situation, which for Heidegger must be understood historically. So Heidegger praises Marx: estrangement roots in modern homelessness, and the Marxist view of history is "superior", whereas neither Husserl nor Sartre enters the historical dimension. The root is not capitalism but the "age of the world picture", which turns humans into free subjects facing mute objects, Sartre's own starting point.
The biographical path Harries traces, which he says does not explain the Kehre.
Sartre had reason to see Heidegger reconciling humanism with the transcendent: thinking is "bound to the advent of Being", which promises the holy and perhaps God. Thinking can only prepare. As Kant's antinomies stop science's reality being identified with reality, the antinomy of Being stops reality being identified with what philosophy can know. In that sense Heidegger's critique is born of care for our humanity: "this is humanism: meditating and caring, that man be human".
Sartre's humanism and the Kehre
Harries reads the Letter on Humanism as Heidegger's reply to Sartre's equation of existentialism with humanism. Sartre's freedom coincides with the nothingness at the heart of man; ends are chosen, not received from God, nature or society. Heidegger's anguish is different: without a transcendent guarantee, the question is whether language can still be the "house of Being" without making Being depend on man. The antinomy Harries names: Being needs language to be said, yet beings exceed what language can hold. The Kehre is not a biographical U-turn from 1933 to Hölderlin but a deeper look at the same question. Waiting for the holy is Heidegger's late stance; Harries asks whether a humanism after metaphysics is still possible.
Harries's contrast inside the humanism debate.
End of philosophy, humanism after all?
Harries closes with two linked questions. If philosophy as metaphysics has reached an end, does that license technological nihilism, or open a thinking that is more sober about language and world? "Humanism after all" is the uneasy yes: not Sartre's cogito-humanism, and not a return to Renaissance studia humanitatis via Grassi without remainder, but a responsibility for how Being is said. The Kehre, Hölderlin, and waiting for the holy are Harries's late-Heidegger materials; the antinomy remains: Being needs language, beings exceed language. Kuki Shūzō's early Heidegger book and the Sartre-Kuki anecdote remind readers that this debate was already translingual in the 1920s-30s.
Where the Letter leaves ethics and humanism.
Three questions Harries starts from
Harries frames the Letter on Humanism with three questions: what is humanism, what does Heidegger reject in Sartre's version, and what if anything remains. Renaissance humanism (Grassi), Gadamer's hermeneutics, and Philipse's ethics sketch are foils. Sartre's freedom-as-nothingness looks like the end of heteronomy; Heidegger hears in it a subjectivism that still makes man the measure. The death of God intensifies rather than settles the quarrel. Reading Harries after Blattner shows the split inside Heidegger reception: analytic of Dasein versus later thinking of Being.
Harries's question path through the Letter.
Sartre's Existentialism and the Nature of Consciousness (Steven Crowell)
10.1 to 10.3 From Husserl to a consciousness without an ego
By 1980, when tens of thousands turned out for "the hated conscience of his century" (John Gerassi's title), Being and Nothingness looked passé: naive, pre-linguistic-turn, phenomenological, abandoned by Sartre himself for Marxism, "the philosophy of our time". Crowell argues Sartre's existentialism follows from phenomenological premises, and consciousness is respectable again.
The target is Cartesian idealism: the mind as a theater of "ideas", representations ontologically distinct from what they represent, bringing skepticism in its wake. Husserl's phenomenology brackets third-person theories and finds intentionality: all consciousness is consciousness of something as something. This is descriptive, not a hypothesis about contents (seeing a tree is not seeing a photograph of one), and it finds a world of meanings ("loveable oafs, inviting pools") whose constitution reflection traces. A Ming vase is fragile not because of its clay (dropped clay is just "rearranged") but because norms of what it is meant to be are at work in my experience. Constituted does not mean subjective: the vase is transcendent, as are numbers, institutions, quarks and other minds. Sartre: "for centuries we have not felt in philosophy such a realistic current". Its world is one of agonies and rebellions: a realism of meaning.
Crowell's thread through The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness.
The ego is neither a mental act nor plainly a worldly thing; Husserl spoke paradoxically of "transcendence in immanence" and a transcendental ego. In The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre answers: "the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness; it is outside, in the world." He rejects Kant's formal "I think must be able to accompany" because the question concerns the I's existence in fact. Reflecting on running for a streetcar, I appear as agent, in a state, with a quality ("late again"); but lived pre-reflectively there is only "consciousness of the streetcar-as-having-to-be-overtaken", and "me, I have disappeared". The object unifies experience; an ego would "slide into consciousness like an opaque blade". Interiority is as transcendent as exteriority.
Yet all consciousness is self-consciousness in another sense: non-positional awareness of itself as perceiving. Blindsight shows at most an information-processing aspect separable from conscious experience; and self-awareness cannot be a higher-order state, on pain of regress. It is "the law of its existence": "Behind the cogito of Descartes we must find the pre-reflective cogito."
10.4 Being-in-itself and being-for-itself
Being and Nothingness has three interlocutors: from Husserl the phenomenon (the thing as it appears, not Kantian mere appearance); from Heidegger the question of its being; from Hegel the two regions. The phenomenon has two transphenomenalities: the tree is not reducible to its appearances (being-in-itself, which "is what it is"; compare Roquentin's chestnut root in Nausea, "tons and tons of existence") and appearing belongs to it (being-for-itself, which "is what it is not and is not what it is"). The for-itself depends on what it reveals, Sartre's "ontological proof": consciousness is "born supported by a being which is not itself". The non-coincidence is the basis of human alienation.
10.5 to 10.7 Negation, freedom, anguish
"Man is the being through whom nothingness comes into the world." Why start with negation? Because meaning requires possibility, and ontological possibility (unlike logical possibility) is not. Seeing the vase as fragile, I step lightly around it before any judgment: a "pre-judicative comprehension of nothingness". Sartre's négatités (distance, change, regret, distraction) generalize: a wobbly table is wobbly only against a norm it "does not" meet. Appeal to human expectation explains nothing, since expectation is itself a négatité. Expecting Pierre in the café and finding him absent requires "an act of thought which no prior state can determine": consciousness is not a causally ordered "stream of Erlebnisse". It contains nothing; in being aware of the tree it is non-positionally aware of not being the tree. Non-positional self-awareness is the origin of negation and so of freedom: "the essence of human being is suspended in his freedom". "Existence precedes essence" derives from this; selfhood is "performance".
The proof of freedom is that it is a condition of meaning, not a property of the will. Free will and determinism are both "patterns of flight"; "Determinism ... is first an attitude of excuse", and pride in a "little God which inhabits me" is the same error. Freedom is known in anguish, because "there is never a motive in consciousness; motives are only for consciousness".
Sartre's two examples of anguish.
On a narrow ledge I "take measures", yet "I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it". The gambler who vowed to quit finds at the table that his motives are still "there" but powerless unless reconstituted now: "Wesen ist was gewesen ist", essence is what has been. My facticity is "a demand without being a recourse": I must own my past, but it does not excuse what I do next.
10.8 Engagement, values, and bad faith
Why are we not always in anguish? Because we act. "To apprehend the summons of the alarm as a summons is to get up." Engaged consciousness is clothed in practical identities (Crowell cites Korsgaard): the alarm addresses me as breadwinner. Values are ideal: "demands which lay a claim to a foundation" that cannot be being. Rational justification does not change this, because the gap between a value's normativity and its exigency (normative force) remains; value "derives its being from its exigency". So "my freedom is the unique foundation of values". Ordinary morality diverts us: my bourgeois indignation gives spitting and lying their "baseness"; to someone without my commitments it may not be base. "Which of us is correct? We both are." Hence people cling to "family values" "with the tenacity of pit bulls".
| Concept | Sartre's claim | Crowell's gloss |
|---|---|---|
| Non-positional self-awareness | Consciousness is aware of itself without making itself an object | The thread through the whole book |
| Négatité | Things met in light of what they are not | Meaning requires possibility |
| Anguish | The consciousness of freedom | Motives are only for consciousness |
| Bad faith | Pre-reflective hide-and-seek with oneself | Made possible by non-coincidence |
| Fundamental project | A basic choice of being shown in style | Needs existential psychoanalysis |
| The Look | Shame reveals me as object for another subject | The death of my possibilities |
Bad faith is pre-reflective self-deception, possible because I do not possess my identity as "an inkwell is an inkwell". The coward treats each act as a one-off and counts on being brave "when it counts"; he deflects the demand for sincerity (itself "in bad faith", since it asks me to be a thing), denying cowardice in the way a table is not a chair. Bad faith is "meta-stable", and trades on "to believe is to know that one believes ... it is only to believe". The self in bad faith is "a perpetual sophist".
10.9 Self as performance
Life is "a constantly renewed obligation to remake the Self". Selfhood is a project that makes the world my situation, decided "without justification and without excuse". This radicalizes autonomy. The waiter "playing at being a waiter" is only an extreme case of what we all must do to be anything. Beneath roles lies the fundamental project, conscious but sedimented, uncovered by existential psychoanalysis (Baudelaire, The Family Idiot). Yet the structure is contradictory: we aim at a consciousness that would found its own in-itself, "which can be called God"; "man is a useless passion". Human reality is also social: projects use given norms and roles, so there are, in fact, others; mine is not the world of an evil demon or a brain in a vat. My being-for-others is an ontological feature of me.
The Look: from absorbed action to being an object for another.
10.10 and 10.11 The Look and the space of conflict
Sartre recasts the problem of other minds: probabilistic inference presupposes an experience of the Other "given to me directly as subject". First, the Other-as-object is an absence that can never come into view, unlike the back of a house in Husserl's analysis: a "drain hole" through which my world runs off. Second, that presupposes the Other-as-subject, met when I experience myself as object, affectively, in shame: "I recognize that I am as the Other sees me." At the keyhole, footsteps make the self "haunt the unreflective consciousness"; "my shame is my confession". The Other means the death of my possibilities: shadows become places I can be found, the keyhole evidence, the stairs the way the captor comes (a theme Ratcliffe and Broome take into psychiatry in Chapter 17).
The Me is now produced by the Other and becomes the stake of a permanent contest: "Hell is - other people!" Autonomy must be wrested from the Other: rebellion. All my objective qualities first come from the Other ("a European in relation to Asiatics"); being a Jew or a woman is first discovered through the anti-Semite's or the man's eyes, and to refuse that Me I must first assume it. The field is not level: patriarchy, capitalism, racism, heterosexism keep some in the object-position, making men "simply subjects". Sartre came to doubt that existentialism suffices for liberation, but never that it is necessary.
Idealism, intentionality, and the ego expelled
Crowell places Sartre against modern idealism: the thesis that the mind's structure somehow produces or guarantees the world. Sartre keeps intentionality (consciousness is always of something) from Husserl, then radicalizes it. In The Transcendence of the Ego there are no contents in consciousness and no ego inside it. The "I" appears only when reflection takes the stream as its object; ordinarily consciousness is non-positionally aware of itself while positionally aware of the world. That move blocks both a Husserlian transcendental ego and a Cartesian inner theater.
Being splits into being-in-itself (opaque, identical with itself, neither possible nor necessary) and being-for-itself (the nihilation that is consciousness). Crowell tracks how negation and possibility are not added by judgment but lived: the café where Pierre is absent is structured by that absence; the gambler who has resolved not to play finds the resolution has no force in the present. Anguish before the future (vertigo at the cliff) and anguish before the past (the gambler) are two faces of the same freedom: motives are only for consciousness, never causes that bind it.
How Transcendence of the Ego feeds Being and Nothingness.
Bad faith, performance, and the Look
Bad faith is not a lie to others but a lie to oneself that exploits the dual structure of facticity and transcendence. The waiter plays at being a waiter; the woman leaves her hand in her companion's as if she were not choosing. Crowell's emphasis: the self is a performance, a project in a situation, not a substance that then acts. Values do not float free of engagement; they appear only inside projects. Yet projects can be fled.
The famous keyhole scene shows being-for-others as the "death of my possibilities": absorbed in jealousy, I am pure act; footsteps in the hall flood me with shame; I exist as myself for the Other. The Look is not first a theory of minds but a bodily metamorphosis. Crowell then widens to the social world as a space of conflict: each freedom risks turning the other into an object, and love, language and "we"-subjects are unstable attempts to live that conflict. Bus and streetcar examples (Crowell; progress notes a slip) show how the social field is already organized before reflection.
Engagement and the chapter's limits
Crowell's chapter stays inside the ontology of Being and Nothingness and the early essays; Flynn (ch11) takes the political career. The point of closing with conflict is not cynicism but precision: a philosophy that begins from non-positional self-awareness cannot treat the social as an afterthought. The Look is how a world of others is born, and how my self-as-object is born with it.
Nothingness in the heart of being
Crowell's Sartre chapter hinges on the claim that "man is the being through whom nothingness comes into the world" and that nothingness "lies coiled in the heart of being." Consciousness is not a "stream of Erlebnisse" but a pre-judicative comprehension of nothingness: awareness of what is not but likely will be. Non-being "always appears within the limits of a human expectation." That ontology funds bad faith, the Look, and engagement: freedom is the gap in being, not a psychological preference. Crowell's later bridge to moral psychology (avowal, practical identity) depends on keeping this ontology, not swapping it for a thin "choose your values" slogan.
Crowell's ontological contrast behind Sartrean ethics.
Intentionality, project, Look, conflict
Crowell walks Sartre out of modern idealism via Husserl's intentionality: consciousness is always of something, yet Sartre denies a substantial ego behind acts. Non-positional self-awareness is how the for-itself is present to itself without being an object. Negation and possibility fund freedom; anguish is freedom's self-awareness; engagement chooses values in a situation while bad faith flees that choice. The self is performance: project plus situation (facticity). Being-for-others is the "death of my possibilities" under the Look; the social world appears first as a space of conflict (later softened in the notebooks and the Critique). Crowell points ahead to Moran on avowal, Korsgaard on practical identity, Detmer and Anderson on ethics, Wider on embodiment, and to Flynn, Bernasconi and Ratcliffe/Broome in this Companion.
['Social world as', 'conflict']
Political Existentialism: The Career of Sartre's Political Thought (Thomas R. Flynn)
Before the war
The young Sartre was anarchic, not political. His friend Paul Nizan joined the PCF at twenty-three, which Sartre found shocking; he resisted the socialism that drew classmates such as Raymond Aron, and would never join a party. He did hate colonialism, thinking of Algeria whenever injustice came to mind. He and Beauvoir did not even vote in 1936; his "heart was on the Left, of course, like everyone else's". Alain's pacifism touched him lightly: it was anti-militarism, not opposition to violence. In Berlin in 1933/34 he studied Husserl and seemed to ignore the Nazi "revolution" outside his window. Yet The Transcendence of the Ego already claims a foundation for "an ethics and a politics which are absolutely positive". He sided with the Spanish Republicans ("The Wall", 1937) but it was not "his" war. Nizan left the Party over the Hitler-Stalin pact, died near Dunkirk in May 1940, and was vilified as an informer; in 1947 Sartre, Mauriac, Aron and others demanded the PCF prove it or retract.
Vintage existentialism (1938-1946)
Back from a Stalag, Sartre founded "Socialism and Freedom" with Merleau-Ponty in March 1941 (about fifty members, nine months). He chose the title for a socialism in which freedom existed, owed partly to "the sad socialism of prisoners"; in 1974 he said this pairing "was my political bent and I've never changed it". He joined David Rousset and Gérard Rosenthal's RDR, a non-Communist "third" option between Cold War blocs, appealing to "situation" as an idea "capable of uniting the Marxists and non-Marxists". The foray soured him on organized politics. Before 1939 he was "an individualism of the Left"; Being and Nothingness still bases relations on the competing gaze, "not the Mitsein; it is conflict": a stare-down ontologically, a Hobbesian war politically.
The stages of Sartre's political career as Flynn charts them.
Ethics, politics, and humanism
At UNESCO (November 1, 1946), Sartre told writers to think "unceasingly" about end and means, the relation of ethics to politics. What saves him from consequentialism are non-negotiables: the free organic individual, never a mere means, and freedom as a value implicit in any choice. Prison solidarity taught that concrete freedom requires expanding others' options: freedom "depends entirely on the freedom of others". After attacking humanisms in Nausea, his War Diaries list four conceptions of man (Action française; racism and Marxism; humanitarianism; anarchic individualism) and note that the "human condition" of each individual "has not yet been unveiled". Beauvoir: in spring 1939 "I learned the value of solidarity."
The historical dimension fits Marx's class subject, but the vintage Sartre lacks the social ontology for it; his interpersonal theory, built on the Look, has not escaped what he later called "analytic reason".
Political existentialism (1947-1952)
What is Literature? makes morality and politics the writer's pressing question and charges the PCF with moralizing about injustice while holding a materialism that makes such blame unwarranted. Its paradox: devoting myself to a few persons as ends, I "take advantage of oppression in order to do good"; throwing myself into revolution, I risk treating even friends as means. Beauty might arouse a formal intention to treat men as ends, but this is "futile in practice"; the task is to "historicize the reader's goodwill" and show it is impossible to treat concrete people as ends today, keeping Kant's city of ends as a long-term ideal. The writer must militate for "the freedom of the person and the socialist revolution". Saint Genet (1952) ends with an either/or: Bukharin (togetherness to martyrdom) or Genet (solitude to Passion), reconciled perhaps only "in the imaginary". This intensifying "Kierkegaardian dialectic" supports Aron's 1946 jibe: "A follower of Kierkegaard cannot at the same time be a follower of Marx."
| Period | Text or act | Means-ends position |
|---|---|---|
| 1945-46 | Existentialism is a Humanism; UNESCO | Willing freedom means willing others' freedom |
| 1947 | What is Literature? | Ends now impossible; historicize goodwill |
| 1951-52 | Devil and the Good Lord; Saint Genet | Ethics "inevitable and at the same time impossible" |
| 1952-56 | The Communists and Peace | The Party represents the proletariat |
| 1960 | Critique of Dialectical Reason | Threefold primacy of praxis |
| 1970s | Talks with the Maoists | A moralist, materialist, libertarian realism |
Fellow-traveling (1952-1956)
He dropped the Notebooks for an Ethics in 1948 as too idealist. The Devil and the Good Lord (1951) mirrors his evolution: Goetz, having coldly killed a subordinate, declares "I shall make them hate me, because I know no other way of loving them." "It is impossible to take an anti-Communist position without being against the proletariat." The Communists and Peace (from July 1952), prompted by the arrest of the PCF's acting head after the protest against General Ridgway, argued "on the basis of my principles and not theirs". A Saint Genet note says any ethic that does not profess that it is "impossible today" bamboozles people; Flynn hears the omelette-and-eggs maxim. Sartre banned Dirty Hands in Vienna during the 1952 peace congress and returned from the USSR in 1954 claiming complete freedom of criticism there, later blaming his secretary Jean Cau.
Between revolutions (1956-1969)
Hungary and the camps sent him back to distance ("The Phantom of Stalin"). Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam drew his disgust at colonialism, a system of impersonal rules where "the meanness is in the system". Flynn amends: the meanness is "(not entirely) in the system"; structures do not excuse people, and "We are all guilty", though Sartre had yet to justify such collective responsibility. Algeria "was his war": Les Temps Modernes was seized, "We Are All Assassins" appeared, and the OAS bombed his apartment entrance twice (1961, 1962). He praised Castro's direct democracy, then turned on his intolerance of criticism. As executive president of the Russell Tribunal (opening May 2, 1967) he judged US conduct in Vietnam by Nuremberg standards; its verdict was genocide.
Flynn's eight features of political existentialism, grouped.
Beyond Communism, beyond Marxism (1968-1980)
Prague 1968 ended his sympathy for Communism generally (Italy excepted): Communists "don't give a fig about justice". May 1968 resonated with his model: (1) moral indignation, (2) spontaneity, (3) camaraderie, (4) disalienation, (5) distrust of parties, (6) direct action, (7) dislike of authority, and (8) violence. "Everything is political." With Benny Lévy and other Maoists he described a path from "irrealist idealism" through "amoralist realism" (with the Communists) to a moralist realism, materialist, anti-hierarchical and libertarian. "Materialist" means objective possibility: "we can always make something out of what we've been made into". Morality "exists at the very level of production".
Search for a Method (originally an essay for a Polish journal, so its fit with the Critique is imperfect) proposes mediations: Marxism "lacks any hierarchy of mediations"; "Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual ... But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry." The progressive-regressive method (from Henri Lefebvre) regresses from, say, Madame Bovary to its structural conditions, then progresses through the totalizing praxis that made them concrete; The Family Idiot, which he defended to the Maoists as socialist work, shows it best. The Critique grounds May through a "threefold primacy of praxis": "There are only men and real relations between men"; structures are sedimented praxis (the practico-inert). Groups fuse in an "apocalyptic moment" out of serial otherness (the TV audience); parties harden into institutions; the sworn group brings "fraternity-terror"; violence comes from interiorized scarcity. "Structures don't take to the streets!"
From the situation of 1943 to the social ontology of the Critique.
At seventy he rejected Marxism as a philosophy of power while keeping class struggle and surplus value: think through Marxism "in order to go beyond it". The alternatives "really are socialism or barbarism". "L'Imagination au pouvoir" fits a philosopher of the imaginary: socialism "makes no sense except as a dream ... where man will be free".
Student to vintage existentialism (1915-1946)
Thomas R. Flynn periodizes Sartre's politics rather than flattening him into one slogan. The École Normale years with Paul Nizan, the friendship and rivalry with Beauvoir, teaching posts, the Phony War, capture, and the Stalag are the apprenticeship. Nausea (1938) and Being and Nothingness (1943) belong to what Flynn calls vintage existentialism: individual freedom, bad faith, the Look. The October 1945 talk "Existentialism Is a Humanism" is the popular hinge; it also locks Sartre into debates with Marxists and Christians about whether a philosophy of freedom can ground solidarity.
Flynn's career arc for Sartre's political thought.
Means and ends, humanisms, RDR
The ethics/politics problem is means and ends: can revolutionary violence be justified by a future freedom? "Political existentialism" (1947-1952) tries to keep individual responsibility inside collective action. The Hungarian crisis of 1956 and the colonial wars force redefinitions; Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) rethinks groups, scarcity and the practico-inert without simply becoming Soviet Marxism.
Vintage vs dialectical Sartre- Vintage. Consciousness, anguish, bad faith; politics as personal engagement. - Dialectical. Scarcity, seriality, groups-in-fusion; history as a field where freedom meets worked matter. - Flynn's claim. The later work does not cancel the earlier; it asks what freedom becomes when others and institutions already shape every project.
Beyond Communism, May 1968
After the mid-1960s Sartre moves beyond Communism and beyond Marxism as party lines, toward anti-colonial solidarity, the Russell Tribunal orbit, and the slogan Flynn highlights from May 1968: "All power to the imagination." The chapter's through-line is that political existentialism is a career, not a doctrine: each phase answers a failure of the last without discarding freedom as the criterion.
Evil, history, and the Kierkegaard/Marx fork
Flynn's Sartre career study stresses that for the later Sartre evil cannot be redeemed by a dialectical happy ending; literature must "historicize the reader's goodwill". The Critique treats scarcity and group formation as arriving "only at the end of a long historical evolution", not as eternal human nature. Sartre's own formula for going "to the limits of ourselves in both directions at once" (toward the singular and the historical) is Flynn's key to political existentialism. Merleau-Ponty's jab still stands as a foil: "A follower of Kierkegaard cannot at the same time be a follower of Marx." Flynn's Sartre tries to hold both poles without dissolving either into dogma.
Political existentialism: both directions.
Career stations Flynn insists on
Flynn periodizes what slogans flatten:
- 1915-1939. Student, scholar, teacher; Husserl in Berlin; early phenomenology and imagination studies.
- 1938-1946. Vintage existentialism: Nausea, BN, Existentialism is a Humanism, No Exit.
- Ethics and politics. Means and ends after the Occupation; notebooks for an ethics he never publishes as such.
- 1947-1952. Political existentialism proper; Temps modernes; fights over commitment.
- Misdirected imaginary. Where imagination serves bad faith or aesthetic escape rather than praxis.
- 1956-1969. Between revolutions; Hungary; the Critique; quarrel with Foucault/Althusser over whether meanness is "in the system" (structures as practico-inert sediment of prior praxes).
- Beyond Communism. Late Sartre past party Marxism; "All power to the imagination" as May '68 echo and Flynn's thesis that Sartre remains a philosopher of the imaginary.
Analytical reason uses concepts of the practico-inert; dialectical reason uses notions of praxis ("translucidity of praxis to itself"). Structures depend ontologically on praxes; systems are intelligible yet not free-standing.
Flynn's nine-station career compressed to six nodes.
Simone de Beauvoir's Existentialism: Freedom and Ambiguity in the Human World (Kristana Arp)
Beyond the disciple story
In July 1940, with Paris occupied and Sartre a prisoner of war, Beauvoir read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the Bibliothèque Nationale from 2 to 5 most days. She had passed the agrégation at twenty-one, read Husserl on time-consciousness in 1935, translated Heidegger for Sartre, and was nicknamed Castor, the beaver. She Came to Stay (August 1943) and Being and Nothingness (June 1943) grew in intense exchange: she read his notebooks; he read her long-polished draft. Her own later claim that she was "not a philosopher" (a philosopher builds a system like Hegel's) reinforced the disciple reading, which Arp rejects.
She Came to Stay: the death of the other
The epigraph is Hegel's "Each consciousness seeks the death of the other". Françoise finds her rival's consciousness "like death, a total negation", an abyss that nonetheless exists fully for itself; the threat of being defined from outside ends in murder. Whether the parallels with Sartre's Look come from her or from him is debated; either way, the novel is existentialist. Its opening gives a theme all her own: walking through the empty theater, Françoise feels "her presence revived things"; "She alone released the meaning of these abandoned places." Beauvoir later calls this disclosure (dévoilement), a "metaphysical vision" of the kind her "Literature and Metaphysics" assigns to the metaphysical novel.
Arp's sequence through Beauvoir's existentialist period, 1938-1949.
"Pyrrhus and Cineas": freedom and meaning
Plutarch's Pyrrhus, asked what he will do after conquering the world, says he will rest; Cineas: "Why not rest right away?" Montaigne sided with Cineas; Beauvoir sides with Pyrrhus (without his imperialism). Neither God, humanity, death, pleasure, destiny nor the universe gives life meaning; only a freely chosen goal does. Unlike the novel, the essay sees others as necessary: my surpassed goals "fall back on themselves, inert and useless" unless others carry them into new projects; "freedom is the only reality I cannot transcend" (Kant's dove needs the resistance of air). Yet she keeps a Stoic inner freedom no one can breach, so violence cannot touch it and devotion cannot help: "I never create anything for the other except points of departure." Devotion that tries to justify me by another's absolute value is flight from freedom, a trap she sees women as especially liable to: Elizabeth (She Came to Stay), Hélène (The Blood of Others), Regina (All Men Are Mortal).
Les Temps Modernes: existentialism and politics
"Existentialism and Popular Wisdom" (1945) defends the doctrine as more honest than sentimental idealism and more life-affirming than cynical self-interest: existentialists find the foundation of being "in these human relationships" (a description that fits neither the Look nor her own duel of consciousnesses). The word "existentialism" was Gabriel Marcel's. "Moral Idealism and Political Realism" calls for "lucid political action": authentic ethics is political and authentic politics ethical, but no pre-existing standards and no "end justifies the means", since ends are valued only by those who struggle for them. Gender did not yet figure in their idea of situation. "An Eye for an Eye" justifies executing war criminals: torture reduces people to things, and absolute evil is acknowledging only one's own subjectivity. The ideal is not equality but reciprocity, "an object for others, each man is a subject for himself", "the metaphysical basis of the idea of justice".
The Ethics of Ambiguity
The human being "is still part of the world of which he is a consciousness": born in "original helplessness", always dependent, liable to be "crushed by the dark weight of things". "From its very beginnings existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity" (from Kierkegaard); duality makes ethics possible, since "One does not offer an ethics to a God". It is "the only philosophy in which ethics has a place". If all are free, why do not all act well? Beauvoir distinguishes natural (ontological) freedom from moral freedom: willing oneself free, without escape into devotion, religion or false objectivity.
| Type | How freedom is refused | Arp's note |
|---|---|---|
| Sub-man | Apathy and inaction | Easily used by fanatics |
| Serious man | Treats values as given | Scorned by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre |
| Nihilist | Rejects all values, may destroy | A step above: knows values are made |
| Adventurer | Joyful, but no shared goals | Cut off from others |
| Passionate man | Lives through a person or cause | Knows he confers the value, but may use others |
Disclosure now involves uprooting from inert nature, into which we sometimes long to sink, wishing to become the sky and quiet water we contemplate. Disclosed worlds are shared: "One can reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men." To will disclosure and to assert freedom "are one and the same movement"; to will oneself free is to will "that there be men" by whom the world has meaning, so "to will oneself free is also to will others free". Temporality shows why: only the future keeps the present alive, and "it is other men who open the future to me". Oppression closes the future and reduces life to "pure repetition"; the oppressor too needs others free.
How Beauvoir ties authentic freedom to the freedom of others.
The Second Sex: existentialist roots, Hegelian influence
Begun as a sequel to the Ethics on being a woman and an existentialist, the book, built on library research (few sources cited) and countless conversations in France and the USA, sparked second-wave feminism. "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman." Chapters refute biology, psychoanalysis and historical materialism as destinies. The biology chapter is criticized for negative descriptions of female bodies, but ends: "the body is not a thing, it is a situation" (crediting Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre), and woman is "a becoming". Psychoanalysis attends to "the body lived by the subject" but starts from the male body, and "systematically refuse[s] the idea of choice". Marxism does not explain why private property became male-centered. Her prehistory, also criticized, uses Lordship and Bondage: birth and nursing "are not activities", so women did not risk life and did not even reach the bondsman's level.
The new concept is the social Other (with debts to Lévi-Strauss): woman is the absolute Other, unable to turn the tables because "the tie that binds her to her oppressor is unlike any other". This explains contradictory myths of woman as nature, artifice, life, death, danger, purity: always what man is not. Ambiguity recedes; immanence versus transcendence takes over. Reciprocal recognition is the ideal, but men avoid it by making woman "nature raised to the transparency of consciousness": "no man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women". At puberty the girl "becomes an object; and she grasps herself as object"; narcissism, love and mysticism are "Justifications" that seek "transcendence through immanence". Her readiness to see women as complicit draws objections.
The shift Arp detects between the two works.
Mostly the book describes; to say why subordination is wrong it returns to existentialist morality: when transcendence lapses into immanence, imposed, it is "frustration and oppression ... an absolute evil"; for women freedom "cannot authentically assume itself except in revolt". Arp's conclusion: ambiguity, with its stress on our material origins, offers an alternative to Sartre's dualism and an existential naturalism for a century facing danger to the natural world.
Lucid political action
Arp's Beauvoir is not Sartre's disciple with better examples. After Pyrrhus and Cineas and An Eye for an Eye, the Temps modernes essay "Moral Idealism and Political Realism" describes the balancing act of lucid political action: an authentic ethics is political and an authentic politics is ethical, yet no prefabricated moral code can be appealed to ("false objectivity"). Ends get their value from the free acts of those who struggle for them; realists who say the end justifies the means forget that. Committed literature is Beauvoir's practice as much as Sartre's slogan.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, willing freedom means willing disclosure and willing others free, keeping the future open; oppression closes the future into pure repetition. The Second Sex keeps the existential grammar (immanence/transcendence) while letting Hegel's Other and concrete women's situations rewrite it: woman as the absolute Other is a historical and economic structure, not a destiny of consciousness alone.
Arp's line from ambiguity ethics into feminist ontology.
Ambiguity from the start
Arp underlines Beauvoir's claim that "from its very beginnings existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity": each person is "an object for others" and "a subject for himself". Helplessness is original ("there is an original helplessness from which man surges up"), yet the world is "penetrated with human meanings". Disclosure depends on others: "One can reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men." Justice needs a metaphysical basis that is not false objectivity; An Eye for an Eye and the political essays test that claim under occupation and after. The Ethics of Ambiguity then makes willing others' freedom the measure of one's own.
Arp's bridge from ambiguity ontology to engaged politics.
From She Came to Stay to The Second Sex
Arp's sequence: the novel She Came to Stay stages the death of the other as a concrete problem of consciousness, not a thesis illustration. "Pyrrhus and Cineas" asks why act if every end can be undone; freedom must project meaning without false objectivity. Temps modernes articles (including Moral Idealism and Political Realism) make ethics and politics reciprocal. The Ethics of Ambiguity defines existentialism as ambiguity-philosophy and ties willing one's freedom to willing others'. The Second Sex keeps immanence/transcendence while Hegel's Other and women's situations rewrite the ontology: one is not born but becomes a woman (Arp cites the 2009 translation's advantages over 1953). Beauvoir's early praise of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945 Temps modernes review) shows the bodily path into later feminist phenomenology.
Four works, one grammar.
Merleau-Ponty on Body, Flesh, and Visibility (Taylor Carman)
The lived body
Wittgenstein: if someone says "I have a body", ask "Who is speaking here with this mouth?" By 1945 almost no serious philosopher was a substance dualist, so Merleau-Ponty's originality is not anti-dualism but bypassing metaphysics: he does not theorize the mind objectively. I do not perceive my body as Husserl's "thing 'inserted'" between world and subject, nor as two descriptions converging like Morning Star and Evening Star; to observe it "I would have to use a second body". I live it: "my body ... is my point of view on the world", "my general ability to inhabit" a world, the frame of my being in the world.
The body schema is not a representation of the body but the organization of bodily awareness, the practical ability to incorporate the world. "It is the body that 'understands' in the acquisition of habit"; it keeps a "best grip" (meilleure prise) on things and is "an ensemble of lived meanings that finds its equilibrium". The challenge to dualism is deep: our concepts of mind and body are impoverished abstractions from our precognitive sense of ourselves as bodily perceivers and doers.
Goldstein's patient as Merleau-Ponty reads him.
Schneider, Kurt Goldstein's patient with a First World War brain injury ("mind blindness"), could not perform "abstract" movements with eyes closed, yet blew his nose and lit a lamp; he could find his eyebrow only by imagining himself saluting an officer. Goldstein saw a distinction between pointing (Zeigen) and grasping (Greifen), later echoed in Goodale and Milner's ventral and dorsal streams ("vision for perception" and "vision for action"). Merleau-Ponty objects that illness "is a complete form of existence": one cannot deduce the normal from the pathological "by a mere change of sign". When we point to our brow we rehearse nothing; our world is given visually as Schneider's is not. He lacks "motor intentionality", a "motor projection" between movement as process and thought as representation. He cannot survey his movements, recognize his handwriting, or stress anything in a story: "the world no longer has any physiognomy for him".
Flesh
Thinking again about brain damage, Merleau-Ponty now finds Schneider's "groping", blind-vision immersion stranger and more significant than before. The ground of receptivity and spontaneity is flesh (chair): "flesh is not matter, it is not spirit, it is not substance", but the sensibility of things and of ourselves, the visibility of vision, the tangibility of touch. To stand before the world one must be in it; now one must be of it. The objective body, once secondary to the phenomenal body, returns: "the body as sensible and the body as sentient" are what he had called the objective and phenomenal body, and conscious experience rests on a prephenomenal flesh of visibility. Only something perceptible can perceive: this reversibility is more basic than subject and object.
Carman's account of the path from the lived body to flesh.
Cézanne and depth
The Impressionists painted the way objects "strike our eyes", using rainbow colors instead of the browns and blacks of solid things; like empiricist psychology, they were guided by theory, and the result made things look less real. Cézanne "wants to represent the object, to find it again behind the atmosphere", "pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface". He found intuitively what Gestalt psychology later theorized: "lived perspective ... is not geometric or photographic". A film train grows until the frame cannot hold it, whereas a real train simply arrives here; to call an oblique circle an ellipse substitutes what we would see "if we were cameras". So Cézanne's plates bulge, giving "an object in the act of appearing", the "insurpassable plenitude" that defines the real.
| Term | Phenomenology of Perception (1945) | Late work (1959-1961) |
|---|---|---|
| Ground | Lived body, motor intentionality | Flesh, brute or savage being |
| Consciousness | Primary, bodily | Founded on an unconscious pivot |
| Objective body | A late construction | The body as sensible, equal partner |
| Others | Shared behavior and world | Shared flesh: "man is a mirror for man" |
| Painting | Cézanne's Doubt: lived perspective | Eye and Mind: the visibility of the visible |
In "Eye and Mind" the painter "takes his body with him" (Valéry): not "a chunk of space", but "an intertwining of vision and movement", since "the world is made of the same stuff as the body". "My movement is not a decision made by the mind"; vision is not "a function of thought". Painting "celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility": it "gives visible existence to what profane vision thinks is invisible"; "the eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house". Others are given "only as incarnate, as belonging to faces and gestures"; in the mirror I identify unthinkingly with the ghost that is me, there, which is why my reflection never seems to look at me.
Everything visible has "a lining of invisibility". "We cannot imagine how a mind could paint." Merleau-Ponty only seems obvious if we forget how unnatural it is to picture ourselves as souls or, in the current metaphor, computers and programs.
Body schema, habit, and the best grip
Carman stresses that the body schema is not a mental map of limbs but the practical ability to incorporate tools and spaces. "It is the body that 'understands' in the acquisition of habit"; it keeps a "best grip" (meilleure prise) on things. Malebranche and the Sixth Meditation supply the dualist backdrop Merleau-Ponty refuses; Husserl's Ideas II "thing inserted" between world and subject is the phenomenological temptation he also refuses. Gallagher and Goodale/Milner's dorsal/ventral streams are modern parallels Carman cites cautiously: useful analogies, not proofs that Merleau-Ponty "anticipated neuroscience".
Painting: Impressionism, Cézanne, Eye and Mind
Impressionists (Monet, Renoir) painted how objects "strike our eyes" and, like empiricist psychology, made things look less real. Cézanne "wants to represent the object, to find it again behind the atmosphere", pursuing reality without abandoning the sensuous surface. Lived perspective is not geometric or photographic; plates bulge because they show "an object in the act of appearing". In "Eye and Mind" the painter "takes his body with him" "We cannot imagine how a mind could paint."
Flesh and reversibility
Carman's late Merleau-Ponty: flesh is the elemental stuff of visibility in which seer and seen reverse. My hand touching can be touched; the body is on both sides of perception. That reversibility blocks both idealism (mind paints the world) and empiricism (world imprints a blank mind). Clinical and AI readers who treat the body as an input device miss this ontology; Carman's caution about Goodale/Milner analogies stands: useful, not proof of anticipation.
Carman's two strata from early to late Merleau-Ponty.
Existentialism as Literature (Jeff Malpas)
Literature and existentialism
Against David Cooper (Chapter 2), who blames existentialist fiction for misconceptions and excludes Camus, Malpas doubts that existentialism is a "systematic philosophy" (anything systematic in it is just phenomenology) and treats its literature as a parallel, sometimes alternative, route into its thinking. Kundera's "the novelist ... is an explorer of existence" threatens to make all modern literature existentialist; reading lists that enlist Shakespeare, Dickinson, Nabokov, Pinter and Stoppard show the danger. The cure is a distinction. "Existential" (the OED records it from 1693, "existential good") pertains to existence; "existentialist" names a mode of inquiry that thematizes human existence in a world with no pre-given meaning. So King Lear has existential themes without making Shakespeare an existentialist.
Is there still a special link? Of the French core (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty), all but Merleau-Ponty had literary reputations; Kierkegaard's indirect method, Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Dostoevsky's novels point the same way. But literary philosophy is not peculiar to existentialism: Plato, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Proust's Recherche show a French tradition in which philosophy lives in café, lycée, newspaper and theater. Germany differs: Jaspers and Heidegger wrote philosophy as professors, Hesse literature outside the academy, and Heidegger turned "poetic" (via Hölderlin) only in the later work excluded from the canon. So existentialism does not inevitably tend to literature, yet there is a real genre, mainly French, mid-century.
Malpas's distinction that keeps the category meaningful.
Literary precursors
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche stay in philosophy despite their styles. The key literary figure is Dostoevsky, too large for the label but central from Nietzsche to Sartre (Camus staged The Devils as The Possessed in 1959). He sets out the outsider who finds no refuge in God, morality or reason, often divided as his own double: Notes from Underground (Kaufmann: "the best overture to existentialism ever written"), The Double, Raskolnikov's murder as experiment, the four Karamazov brothers ("the double doubled"). His answer is closer to a Christian humanist ethic of love: "The Grand Inquisitor" is left open ("Pro and Contra"), but Alyosha refuses Ivan's offer of world happiness bought with one tortured child, a refusal Camus later echoes.
Kafka presents the same loss of meaning as absurdity without any ethical response: a man becomes a giant beetle and worries about social embarrassment; a trial has no stated crime (his office writings include "Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines"). He prefigures Sartre's nausea and Camus's absurd. Also read this way: Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich (a hollow life faced with a death "finally one's own"), Hamsun's Hunger (urban disintegration, from a writer later sympathetic to the Nazis), and Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge, which Sartre cited as an influence.
Sartre and Beauvoir
For both, writing was about ideas. Sartre (who refused the 1964 Nobel) made Nausea a "metaphysical journal": Roquentin in Bouville (Le Havre) feels revulsion at existence, most vividly at the "black, knotty mass" of a chestnut root, and recognizes its absolute contingency. Increasingly, the response to absurdity matters: What is Literature? (1947) demands committed writing, and Roads to Freedom (planned quartet, fourth unfinished) follows Mathieu Delarue from unused freedom to action. The plays won more acclaim: The Flies (Orestes takes responsibility, free of the gods), No Exit (a Second Empire drawing room: "Hell is - other people!"), The Devil and the Good Lord (Sartre's favorite, where espousing good disguises evil).
Beauvoir (who saw herself as a "writer") wrote one play, Who Shall Die?, defended the "metaphysical novel", and explored relationality and its gendered demands. She Came to Stay (subject of Merleau-Ponty's "Metaphysics and the Novel") turns on the trio of Pierre, Françoise and Xavière (mirroring Olga Kosakievicz): our limited view of others, and the danger they pose. The Blood of Others sets the committed Jean Blomart against the indifferent Hélène, who dies on a Resistance mission: responsibility is inescapable. In All Men are Mortal, immortal Fosca finds detachment; meaning lies only in involvement. The Mandarins (Prix Goncourt, 1954) is a roman à clef of left-wing Paris.
| Writer | Key work | Response to meaninglessness |
|---|---|---|
| Dostoevsky | The Brothers Karamazov | Christian love; refuse the tortured child |
| Kafka | The Trial | None conceivable; the banal turns strange |
| Sartre | Nausea, No Exit | Contingency, then commitment |
| Beauvoir | The Blood of Others | Situated freedom, ambiguity |
| Camus | The Outsider, The Plague | Lucidity, revolt, refusal of violence |
| Beckett | Waiting for Godot | No affirmation; laughter at failure |
Camus and the search for lucidity
The Outsider (with The Myth of Sisyphus) may be the most widely read existentialist work of all, yet Camus is an anomaly, an outsider by background and commitment, who called a novel "a philosophy put into images" and preferred "writer". Interest is reviving, partly because of his stand against political violence in an age of terror. Raised poor in Algiers (father killed in the First World War), helped by teacher Louis Germain, he studied with the essayist Jean Grenier, edited Combat, quarreled with Sartre over The Rebel (1951), won the Nobel in 1957, and died in 1960 with The First Man in his briefcase.
Meursault, a clerk, meets each day with leaden indifference, caring for coffee at his mother's funeral and for swimming; he kills an unnamed Arab, is tried, and awaiting execution finds lucid happiness in existence. He is an outsider because he cannot join the dissemblance that keeps absurdity at bay. With Sisyphus and Caligula (murderous "happiness" in the absurd), this forms the trilogy of the absurd; later works turn from one's own death and suicide to complicity in others' suffering (Camus's own sequence: Sisyphus, Prometheus, Nemesis). The Just Assassins (the 1905 plot against Grand Duke Sergei) divides revolutionaries over killing children. In The Plague, Dr Rieux, hidden narrator, answers Father Paneloux: "I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture", Alyosha's answer again.
Malpas's line of existentialist literature.
The Fall reverses Meursault: Clamence, self-styled "judge-penitent" in an Amsterdam bar, seems frank about failing to stop a woman's suicide from a Paris bridge, but confesses only to show his listeners their own guilt; truthful-seeming, he is wholly dishonest. It is often read as irony aimed at Sartre's existentialism, where guilt is universal and therefore meaningless. The lyrical essays (Nuptials, Summer) show what moves Camus most: being bound to earth, sea and sun, "a life that tastes of warm stone and the sound of the crickets". "The only proofs must be ones that we can touch." This brings him nearer late Heidegger than Sartre, and underlies his sense of being Algerian.
Beckett and absurdism
Martin Esslin coined "theater of the absurd" (1961), sweeping in Ionesco, Adamov, Genet and others who objected. Camus and Sartre present irrationality in "lucid and logically constructed reasoning"; absurdist theater "abandons rational devices", above all through humor: the joke is always on us. Waiting for Godot (written in French, 1952), "a play in which nothing happens, twice", has two tramps waiting for someone they do not know while conversation breaks down; language itself seems empty. Endgame gives blind Hamm, Clov who cannot sit, and parents in bins; Krapp's Last Tape a man of sixty-nine hearing himself at thirty-nine. Beckett shares the bleakness but leaves no room for freedom, engagement, or Camus's rebellious affirmation: only failure and "the suffering of being".
How the writers Malpas discusses answer the same predicament.
Parallels and successors
Hesse's Steppenwolf (Harry Haller torn between man and wolf; papers found after his departure, like Nausea) draws on Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka and Jung, and became a 1960s icon. Sartre admired Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner without calling them existentialists; Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", with its repeated nada, states alienation succinctly. Mailer, Arthur Miller and the Beats (John Clellon Holmes: "pushed up against the wall of oneself") borrowed from Camus, though Zen and native American currents mattered more. Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being begins from Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, "the heaviest of all burdens": living once is the lightest. Such explorations mark modernity itself, and in Sartre, Beauvoir and Beckett literature puts literature in question.
Dostoevsky's double and Kafka's office absurdity
Crime and Punishment turns murder into a philosophical experiment: Raskolnikov tests whether an exceptional man may step outside ordinary morality. The Idiot and The Devils widen the same pressure into groups and politics. Malpas stresses that Dostoevsky's answer is not Sartrean. The parable of The Grand Inquisitor sits in a section titled "Pro and Contra" and withholds resolution, yet Alyosha's refusal of Ivan's bargain (world happiness bought with one tortured child) is the ethical counterweight. Camus later echoes that refusal under the Algerian War's terror and torture.
Kafka refuses even that ethical reply. Gregor Samsa wakes as a giant insect and frets about missing the train; Josef K. is arrested for a crime never named. Malpas juxtaposes this with Kafka's office writings ("Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines") to show how the banal and the strange share one register. The absurd here is not a thesis but a texture. Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich meets a death that is "finally one's own" after a hollow career; Hamsun's Hunger tracks urban disintegration (Malpas notes Hamsun's later Nazi sympathy without letting it erase the novel's force); Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge is the diary Sartre cited as an influence on Nausea.
Precursors Malpas lines up before the French core.
Sartre's plays and Beauvoir's metaphysical novel
Malpas fills out the theatrical Sartre that the novels alone miss. The Flies stages Orestes taking responsibility free of the gods. No Exit locks three people in a Second Empire drawing room: "Hell is - other people!" The Devil and the Good Lord, Sartre's favorite, shows how espousing good can disguise evil. Other plays (The Respectful Prostitute, Dirty Hands, The Condemned of Altona) keep means-and-ends politics on stage. The unfinished Roads to Freedom quartet follows Mathieu Delarue from unused freedom toward action; the fourth novel, planned as A Strange Friendship, was never completed.
Beauvoir's defence of the "metaphysical novel" and Merleau-Ponty's essay "Metaphysics and the Novel" (on She Came to Stay) treat fiction as a way of showing situated freedom, not illustrating a prior theory. Maurois's contrast (philosophy as Sartre's "dough", Beauvoir's "leaven") is Malpas's hinge: her characters carry a mark of reality that lets ambiguity stay ambiguous. Who Shall Die? is her one play; the later autobiographical cycle (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter through Adieux) and A Very Easy Death extend the same insistence on concrete circumstance.
Camus's sequence: Sisyphus, Prometheus, Nemesis
Camus charts his own development by three Greek figures. Sisyphus names the individual's absurd task (the rock rolls back each night). Prometheus names rebellion that steals fire and teaches the arts. Nemesis names the limit that punishes those who overstep, and so our finitude with others. Early work (The Outsider, Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula, and the related Cross Purpose) stays with one's own death and the temptation of suicide. Later work (State of Siege, The Just Assassins, The Plague, The Rebel) turns to complicity in others' suffering and the refusal of murder as politics. Sartre's rival definition of the absurd (universal contingency of being, not Camus's "scandal" between rational demand and irrational world) is quoted from a Grisoli interview; Malpas lets the disagreement stand.
Camus's shift as Malpas and the Carnets present it.
Beckett, Esslin, and American echoes
Martin Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd (1961) bundled Beckett with Ionesco, Adamov and Genet; several of them objected to the label. Camus and Sartre still present irrationality in "lucid and logically constructed reasoning"; absurdist theater "abandons rational devices", above all through humor. Waiting for Godot is "a play in which nothing happens, twice" (Vivian Mercier). Endgame gives blind Hamm, Clov who cannot sit, and Nagg and Nell in bins (the book prints "Ned" for Nagg). Beckett's Proust essay already names "the suffering of being"; Malpas reads the plays as leaving no room for Sartrean engagement or Camusian revolt, only failure and laughter at failure.
American parallels stay carefully weaker. Sartre admired Dos Passos, Hemingway and Faulkner without calling them existentialists; Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (source date 1926, standard publication 1933) repeats nada as alienation. Mailer, Arthur Miller and the Beats (John Clellon Holmes: "pushed up against the wall of oneself") borrowed from Camus, though Zen and native American currents often mattered more. Cotkin's Existential America is Malpas's guide to that reception. Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being begins from Nietzsche's eternal recurrence as "the heaviest of all burdens": living once is the lightest. Marcel's plays (A Man of God, The Broken World, Ariadne) are flagged as a religious literary existentialism that never matched Sartre or Camus in international reach.
Novel as philosophy in images
Malpas recovers Camus's early essay "Metaphysics and the Novel" and the claim that "a novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images" (and that philosophy can be "a philosophy in images"). The novel is not sugar around a thesis: philosophy "serves only as leavening, as yeast"; the story "is the dough itself". Sartre's stage line "Hell is other people" is theater, not a metaphysics of hate; Malpas pairs it with literature's demand that "the only proofs must be ones that we can touch" and that "we must love what we cannot understand." Existentialism as literature is therefore a claim about how truth is shown, not a demotion of argument.
Malpas's literary epistemology in five steps.
Precursors, Beckett, and American afterlives
Malpas's literary map has layers Cooper's manifesto underplays. Dostoevsky and Kafka are precursors: underground freedom, guilt without clear law, worlds that will not justify themselves. Beckett is "the suffering of being": Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd; Mercier's joke that Godot is a play in which "nothing happens, twice"; Beckett's Proust on habit and time. Sartre's Dos Passos essay and Killinger's (unconvincing, Malpas says) Hemingway reading show how easily the label sticks to style. American afterlives run through Cotkin's Existential America and Holmes's Beat Generation: not copycats of Paris but partners in a longer conversation about contingency. Camus's absurd is "the universal contingency of being which is, but which is not the basis of its being"; literature shows that contingency in images that argument alone cannot touch.
Literature as existential method.
Existentialism and Religion (Merold Westphal)
Faith rather than religion
Treating history as a museum ("It has nothing to do with us") is the opposite of the existential spirit. "Religion" suggests an object for scholarly observation; existentialism is about deciding what to do with my life, as Socrates told Callicles. At twenty-two Kierkegaard wrote that the thing is "to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die". Faith is the act of appropriation by which we commit ourselves and even define our identity; from Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi and King we learn to ask not what we would kill for but what we would die for.
15.1 Kierkegaard
The existence spheres answer "what makes the good life good?" The aesthete's criteria are pre-moral (the pleasant, the interesting); in the ethical, moral criteria trump all others; the religious differs in the source of the highest norms. Kierkegaard's ethical is Hegelian Sittlichkeit: the laws and customs of one's people, since "philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts". He attacks Hegel and an all-too-Hegelian Christendom for thinking they have arrived. Revelation is God exploding the finality of our horizons from within and beyond them; faith is the response, admitting that neither self nor society is absolute.
Westphal's three corollaries of Abraham's faith, and where they lead.
In Fear and Trembling, Abraham (the paradigm in Romans, Galatians and Hebrews) is the knight of faith; Kierkegaard knows the setting of Genesis 12-22, where promise precedes command. Three corollaries follow. First, faith is faith in a person, trust and obedience toward a God who makes promises and commands, not belief that a proposition is true. Second, it escapes the Platonic frame, where pistis sits in the cave as a failed attempt at knowledge; Biblical pistis is a whole person's I-Thou relation, more like receiving a gift. Philosophical Fragments contrasts recollection (truth already within) with revelation (God gives both the truth and the condition to recognize it); to call faith inferior knowledge begs the question whether revelation occurs. Third, Kierkegaard insists faith goes against reason, meaning the Enlightenment project of "religion within the limits of reason alone" (Spinoza, Kant, Hegel), which picks and chooses or reinterprets. So faith is paradox, absurd, madness, and offense: "one never comes to faith except from the possibility of offense." "The amazing thing is that you think that it is an objection"; Reason's discovery of the opposition is an "acoustic illusion", since the Paradox announced it first.
Christian faith's own paradox is the Incarnation and salvation from sin, worse than finitude. What is existential in all this? Risk: commitment without guarantees, against modernity's quest for guaranteed certainty. Passion: deep and lasting love, like a passion for fly fishing or opera, but the deepest; hence "the objective uncertainty ... in the most passionate inwardness is truth ... another way of saying faith". Choice: the will, not only the intellect, places me in a sphere. Urgency: abandon fly fishing and you are the same person; abandon faith and you are deeply different. Hegel's Christendom offers only Nietzsche's "Wretched contentment!"
15.2 Nietzsche
The other founding father is important by being anti-religious. Neither proves his case; each preaches to a choir, insisting that being Christian, or being secular, is harder than people assume. The madman's "We have killed him - you and I" names a historical, not metaphysical, event: belief in the Christian God "has become unbelievable", a revolution begun but unfinished. Nietzsche plays John the Baptist to an atheist kingdom already inaugurated but awaiting fulfillment, as the Gospels' Kingdom of God and globalizers' democratic capitalism are announced.
The two founders as mirror images in Westphal's reading.
He ignores "the 'o' that distinguishes the Platonic Good from the Christian God": "Christianity is Platonism for 'the people'". "God" means any eternal, unconditioned source of norms. Heidegger glosses the death of God as the "deposing of the suprasensory", which "bestows no life"; secular modernity quickly installs replacements (conscience, reason, progress, the greatest happiness, creativity, business: Heidegger sees the Market among the new gods). Nietzsche names one more: science, resting on "a metaphysical faith" that truth is divine; this challenges objectivism in all disciplines and echoes Kierkegaard's objective uncertainty, putting both among the "postmodern". The event brings ambivalence: gloom and homesickness, but also "a new dawn ... the sea, our sea, lies open again". As faith must pass through offense, atheism must overcome nostalgia.
15.3 Sartre
Sartre presupposes God's unreality and draws the consequences, opposing secular ethics that would "abolish God with the least possible expense" while keeping values "inscribed in an intelligible heaven". "If God does not exist, everything is permissible" (Ivan Karamazov's line, not Dostoevsky's, as Westphal notes) "is the starting point". Despite "two kinds" of existentialism, only the atheist can say existence precedes essence: a Creator would have a normative idea of us, as a maker has of a paper-cutter. So values are invented, not discovered; universal features are only the human condition. We are "condemned to be free".
| Thinker | God | Key move | Westphal's question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kierkegaard | Personal, speaking, acting | Faith as risky passion against Reason | None: his model case |
| Nietzsche | Killed by us, historically | Atheism must outgrow nostalgia | Is honesty his one a priori value |
| Sartre | Absent; we desire to be God | Values invented; choose for all | Why does my choice bind others |
| Marcel | Absolute Thou, hinted | Love, availability, "I belong to you" | Deliberately unhurried |
Two claims perplex. If in choosing I choose "for all", what makes my groundless choice bind others? My left-wing politics would leave you free to be a fascist, as my coffee ice cream leaves you chocolate. Is this a residue of Platonism, Christianity or Kant? And if judgments rest on choices, they cannot make choices non-arbitrary; told "I declare that you are [in bad faith]", one may answer, "Are you Kant in disguise?" Honesty looks like the one value Sartre and Nietzsche treat as a priori. The Sartrean self is not "before God" but before the Look; God would be the ultimate threat, so I desire to be God, and relations become masochism and sadism, a war of all against all. Since the desire to be God is given, not chosen, Sartre reads like a secular theologian of original sin, whose footnote allows an ethics of deliverance only "after a radical conversion".
15.4 Marcel
Marcel: never has grace "been denied with such audacity and such impudence", though nothing in Sartre is "more remarkable" than the Look. As a phenomenologist he adds what Sartre omits: encounter as receptivity, welcome, hospitality, sharing, in a word love, with God hinted as the absolute thou of prayer. "You belong to me" and "I belong to myself" fit Sartre; "I belong to you" is a different availability, which alone allows genuine admiration (and, toward God, adoration). His ethic: "I must somehow make room for the other in myself", leaving God's command and grace as possibilities, an alternative to Sartrean despair.
Marcel's three sayings, as Westphal presents them.
Teleological suspension and the three sayings
Westphal's Kierkegaard block centers on Abraham: ethically speaking, murder; religiously speaking, sacrifice. Faith's paradox is that the single individual is higher than the universal (society's laws and customs) by relating to the absolute (God), not the reverse. That is the teleological suspension of the ethical, an Aufhebung that suspends and preserves.
Nietzsche mirrors Kierkegaard as atheism through nostalgia versus faith through possible offense. Sartre's religion chapter materials treat bad faith and the desire to be God; Marcel's three sayings (you belong to me / I belong to myself / I belong to you) mark the only posture that makes room for admiration, love and perhaps God. Westphal's through-line: existential philosophy of religion is about how one stands, not about proving a thesis in natural theology.
Religion as stance, not doctrine.
Marcel's belonging and Sartre's desire to be God
Westphal's Marcel triad (you belong to me / I belong to myself / I belong to you) marks availability (disponibilité) against possession and isolation. Sartre's religious psychology, by contrast, reads the desire to be God as the impossible project that structures bad faith. Nietzsche's nostalgia for the dead God and Kierkegaard's possible offense are the bookends: atheism that still feels the loss, and faith that risks looking absurd to the ethical universal. Westphal refuses to flatten these into one "existentialist view of religion".
Westphal's four religious postures in order of the chapter.
Faith in, belief that
Westphal's lexical hinge: biblical and existential faith is trust (faith in a person), not a failed science of propositions (belief that). Kierkegaard's Abraham, Nietzsche's madman, Sartre's impossible God-project and Marcel's belonging are four ways of standing before that distinction. The teleological suspension does not abolish ethics; it Aufhebung-suspends the universal for an absolute duty that looks like murder from outside. Westphal's chapter therefore belongs next to Hannay (method) and Dreyfus (self as relation): same authorship cluster, different pressure on religion.
Westphal's contrast that organizes the four voices.
Racism is a System: How Existentialism Became Dialectical in Fanon and Sartre (Robert Bernasconi)
Why this still matters
In the United States and beyond, racism is located in the mind: one is racist only if one says racist things, so the fight shrinks to policing language while massive inequalities in education, health and wealth, the persistence of past racisms, go unaddressed. De facto school segregation is tolerated where legal segregation was not; individualism and legalism make systemic effects "non-imputable". Sartre and Fanon offer an unsurpassed, neglected critique of racist structures. Their early accounts of being seen as raced feed today's critical philosophy of race, but are read as individual experience; The Wretched of the Earth is read only for violence; and few know how Anti-Semite and Jew is revised in the Critique. Existentialism was shaped not only by the Cold War but by wars of liberation, something philosophers in Africa never forgot.
Fanon turns Sartre's tools against him
Being and Nothingness showed the gaze stripping me of transcendence (the keyhole); Anti-Semite and Jew made the anti-Semite's gaze make the Jew. Sartre later conceded that Jews draw identity from their own history, and his only exit, waiting for a classless society, was troubling. Arriving from Martinique, Fanon found himself seen first as Black and took up Sartre's frame: "It is the racist who creates the inferiorized." Sartre's description of the Jew's "long flight from others and from himself" moved him to his core.
The quarrel over "Black Orpheus" as Bernasconi reconstructs it.
The trouble began with "Black Orpheus", the preface to Senghor's anthology of negritude poetry. Fanon criticized Senghor for looking backward and Sartre for closing the future: "Negritude is dialectical", a stage to be surpassed for a classless society. Sartre could cite Jacques Roumain ("I want to be only of your race / peasant workers of all countries"), but there were many Black voices to choose from. Neither man yet understood dialectic; Fanon's charge was a Hegelianism that loses concrete experience: "Consciousness committed to experience knows nothing, has to know nothing, of the essence and determination of its being." Sartre forgot how Blacks suffer in their bodies, which he could forget only because he never knew it. In effect Fanon claimed to be the better existentialist.
From the analytic spirit to the system
Sartre's route to dialectic began with the "analytic spirit" of bourgeois universalism, which "resolves all collectivities into individual elements" and recognizes "only man". Analysis once liberated (against the ancien régime) but has become reactionary; racism even takes new forms to compensate for universalism, as when freed slaves gained rights and books like Charles Carroll's The Negro a Beast appeared. Echoing de Maistre, Sartre wrote: "man does not exist; there are Jews, Protestants, Catholics". Anti-Semitism is not "opinion" but a "syncretic totality" of a person's life; so education and law are useless, and one must change the situation so that "freedom decides on other bases". The limits are obvious once racism is tied to colonialism: the racist has an economic interest.
Sartre exempted minor officials and European workers as "innocent victims and beneficiaries"; Fanon was less forgiving, citing Sartre's own "there is not one of us who is not totally guilty". Memmi, an Arab Jew in Tunisia, shows the colonizer's unchosen privileges, which breed "colonial racism", unlike the doctrinal racism of distant theorists.
Racism in the Critique
Search for a Method marries existentialism to Marxism, against the Kierkegaardian allergy to systems; analytic reason remains a moment inside dialectical reason. "Dialectical" names something familiar: action gets its intelligibility from an objective pursued within an inherited system that it modifies, above all the practical consciousness of the oppressed. Sartre prefers "system" to "structure" because structure suggests an external framework for analytic reason, whereas system is a relational whole we participate in: hence "systemic racism".
Sartre's account of systemic racism in the Critique.
The essence of racism is not a thought at all; race laws, doctrines and remarks are symptoms. The "Idea" comes from his reading of Braudel on Spanish gold: materiality turns praxis into "antipraxis", "a praxis without an author". Gold is not "an invention of the mind" but "a petrification of action", the practico-inert, which "has the materiality of a fact because no one thinks it". This distances Sartre from the social constructionism often pinned on him. The colony is such a field: competing colonists share an interest in keeping natives down, different, and seen as subhuman, so colonialism produces its "Idea of stone". To treat a man like a dog one must first see him as a man; denying humanity to others, colonists must "harden" and dehumanize themselves, a "pitiless reciprocity", echoed in Fanon's reciprocal violence and counterviolence.
Fanon's "reactional" Black ("the black man's first action is a reaction"; the Jew who becomes anti-Semite in The Reprieve) may be where he influenced the Critique: being-Jewish becomes a serial unity, each Jew seeing others with good jobs as the problem, like people ahead of me at a bus stop. "Racism is the colonial interest lived as a link of all the colonialists ... through the serial flight of alterity"; in Algeria colonists' average income was ten times the natives'. Bernasconi's house-sale example: I need only believe other Whites will avoid my street to sell early, "rationally", and segregation advances whether or not anyone objects. Acquiescence is already racism; my racism is the racism of the Other.
| Stage | Sartre | Fanon |
|---|---|---|
| Late 1940s | The gaze makes the Jew; change the situation | The racist creates the inferiorized |
| 1948-1952 | Black Orpheus: negritude a stage | Needs not to know; suffering bodies; structure |
| 1956-1957 | Colonialism is a System; I see a system | FLN struggle |
| 1960-1961 | Critique: practico-inert, seriality | Wretched of the Earth: system, dialectic, nation |
The Wretched of the Earth
"On Violence" opens in Sartre's language: "It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject." Later-written chapters speak of dialectic; the colonized look at the colonizer is "a look of envy" rooted in hunger: "You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich." Sartre's scarcity now matches Fanon's insistence on economic mediation. Fanon's faith in humanity ("create a new man") and in the nation exceeds Sartre's: "to make the experience of the nation the experience of every citizen". For Fanon the decisive category is nation, not race, yet race still "divides this world"; he adopts Sartre's controversial "anti-racist racism" only to go beyond it: hatred and revenge "alone cannot nurture a war of liberation".
How Fanon revises his early stance in The Wretched of the Earth.
"People must know where they are going and why", and "this lucidity must remain deeply dialectical". This is no concession to "Black Orpheus": the new man coexists and matures with the nation rather than being a stage to look beyond. Where Fanon once needed not to know, he now names what people must know, a future that is his own and humanity's. It is the colonizers who must learn renunciation; perhaps Fanon was still the better existentialist.
From situation to system
Bernasconi's hinge is Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew: anti-Semitism as a total choice in a situation, fought by changing the bases on which freedom decides. Fanon shows why that is not enough under colonialism: the racist has ideology and economic interest. Black Skin, White Masks turns Sartre's Look and bad faith against a white-authored universalism; The Wretched of the Earth and Sartre's preface push existentialism into a dialectical register where racism is a system. The Critique of Dialectical Reason then rethinks practico-inert structures; Bernasconi tracks how "anti-racist racism" and related formulas have been mis-glossed (progress flags the affirmative-action-style misreading).
Bernasconi's path from vintage situation to system.
Practico-inert and the colonial situation
Bernasconi's Critique reading: once racism is a system, the practico-inert (worked matter, institutions, sedimented meanings) carries white supremacy beyond any one chooser's bad faith. Fanon's Wretched and Sartre's preface force a new humanism forged in struggle, not a European endowment. The analytic spirit of Anti-Semite and Jew is not discarded; it is dialecticized. That is how existentialism, on Bernasconi's telling, becomes able to talk about colonialism without reducing it to private prejudice.
Bernasconi's upgrade path for anti-racist existentialism.
Black Orpheus and the mistranslation trap
Bernasconi tracks Sartre's "Black Orpheus" and Fanon's reply: negritude as a moment that must be passed through, not a final essence. Braudel-scale material history and Hacking-style social construction debates appear as foils; Marcano's critique is noted. The phrase "anti-racist racism" is glossed in a footnote register that later readers flatten into affirmative action; the A closer look keeps the mistranslation flag. Fanon's Toward the African Revolution and the Antillean/African distinction show why a single "Black" situation will not do. Existentialism becomes dialectical when it can say: the meanness is (not entirely) in the system, and the system is sediment of praxes that can be taken up again.
Bernasconi's dialectical sequence with Black Orpheus restored.
Existential Phenomenology, Psychiatric Illness, and the Death of Possibilities (Matthew Ratcliffe and Matthew Broome)
17.1 Psychiatry and existential phenomenology
"Existential phenomenology" (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger) is narrower than existentialism and contrasts with Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, though the later Husserl also informs psychiatry. Its themes: a world that matters, experience structured by possibility, and the role of the body. The history is long: Heidegger's friendships with Jaspers and Medard Boss and the Zollikon seminars for trainee psychiatrists (1959-69); Binswanger's Daseinsanalyse (which Heidegger disliked); Merleau-Ponty's use of anomalous cases; Sartre's correspondence with R. D. Laing, whose The Divided Self draws on Being and Nothingness Part III; and a roll from Kurt Schneider to Minkowski, Frankl, Rollo May and Gendlin.
There are three strands: phenomenology interprets illness; illness informs phenomenology; existential themes shape therapy. The authors take the first two: to do phenomenology by engaging with psychiatry, not merely apply it. Against Mary Warnock, who called existentialism dead because "philosophy without arguments is not possible" and one cannot accept a theory of others from "the man listening at the keyhole", they claim that a substantial body of patient and clinician testimony supports the descriptions. Their method borrows Cooper's generic existentialist (Chapter 2) rather than one author.
Sartre's shame as Ratcliffe and Broome analyse it.
17.2 The death of possibilities
At the keyhole the voyeur's body recedes; at a footstep comes shame with no inference: "an immediate shudder which runs through me from head to foot without any discursive preparation". The body stops being a transparent medium and becomes conspicuous, an object for someone else: "I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other." In the park, objects "regroup" around the man on the bench. The Look is the sense of being seen, triggered by "a rustling in the branches"; one can be wrong about a particular presence but cannot coherently doubt there are others: the disposition is "sewn into the structure of our consciousness".
Consciousness is an opening onto the world, but "the very nature of the for-itself demands that it be a body". Without bodily limits I "could never distinguish within me desire from will, nor dream from act"; experience would vanish. The body is lived as the world: things show up as usable, inaccessible, dangerous because of our capacities. So we are our bodies and so we are our possibilities. The Look brings "the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities": "in the look the death of my possibilities causes me to experience the Other's freedom". Yet "I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am."
17.3 Interpersonal experience in schizophrenia
Sartre's view is one-sided: Merleau-Ponty says it fits only breakdowns where actions are "observed as if they were an insect's". In the park the bin and swings remain "there for us"; and showing a town to different people, van den Berg notes, enriches it. Still, Sartre fits some illness well, as Laing saw (the authors do not endorse most of Laing). Laing: the schizophrenic's "mad things" are "a closed book" without their existential context; persons are a basic ontological category, and a science that treats them as mechanisms is "no less pathological".
| Form of change | What becomes salient or lost | Example in the chapter |
|---|---|---|
| People as threat | Threat swamps all other possibilities | Laing's "implosion"; JB watched through walls |
| Disconnection | The possibility of being affected is gone | James's "india-rubber"; Plath's bell jar |
| Loss of persons as such | Others appear as statues, puppets | Renee, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl |
Schizoid and schizophrenic people are "exposed", over-sensitized to the Look: "made of glass ... a look directed at him splinters him to bits". This is ontological insecurity. Broome's 2008 interview with JB, a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia, gives first-person detail: neighbors who could "see me through the walls", feeling "violated", "used", "very guilty", thoughts manipulated, "something was taken from me". The extreme is implosion: the world "liable at any moment to crash in and obliterate all identity, as a gas will rush in ... a vacuum". Responses parallel bad faith: surrender into an object (the waiter) or retreat (the woman who disowns her hand). Laing's false self fails: hyper-conscious self-monitoring and detachment are themselves a loss of possibility ("You have to live in a world with other people"). JB describes bodily "coldness", self-conscious "tricks" for talk, and being unable to show his crying mother how sad he felt. Disowned body parts may be felt as possessed by others, a disposition to delusion, and isolation worsens psychosis.
Three forms of interpersonal change the authors distinguish.
Laing, unlike Sartre, separates healthy mutual perception from the death of possibilities: we need "to have one's presence endorsed or confirmed ... the need, in fact, to be loved". Sartre's strength is that his account captures what folk psychology, theory-theory and simulation miss: they model a detached observer inferring mental states in a strangely impersonal way, whereas our sense of others is affective, bodily, perceptual, and a change in our possibilities.
17.4 The structure of the possible
JB's body felt "very stiff, very lifeless", so that he could barely walk (before any medication, the note stresses): a bodily change that is a change in salient possibilities. In severe depression people feel not threatened but disconnected: the very possibility of being moved is gone. William James: "sheathed in india-rubber"; Plath's Esther under "the same glass bell jar". Since being affectable is part of sensing that one's predicament is contingent, depression brings the near-universal conviction that recovery is impossible; Lewis Wolpert "did not believe a single word". This reverses Sartre: others give possibilities as well as take them ("to die is to lose all possibility of revealing oneself as subject to an Other"). Some kinds remain, such as dread; and depressed people speak of a living death.
Depression read through Heidegger's thrown projection.
In Sartre's terms depression alters the for-itself, which is "an elsewhere in relation to itself"; when the future offers nothing different, the present loses its contingency and time collapses (eternity, timelessness, slowing). In Heidegger's terms, thrown projection breaks: with no mattering, no project can be pursued. A third change removes what both presuppose, the experience of others as people: Renee saw a "statue ... a puppet, part of the pasteboard scenery", her therapist her last "oasis of reality". Artificiality is the absence of the possibilities things usually offer. The upshot: not a dead movement but an ongoing research program.
Psychiatry's existential archive
Ratcliffe and Broome open by recalling how psychiatry already once spoke existential language: Jaspers's phenomenology, Binswanger's Daseinsanalyse, Minkowski, Straus, von Weizsäcker, Frankl, and the Schneider/Goldstein orbit that Merleau-Ponty also used. The chapter's wager is narrower and sharper: certain psychiatric alterations are best understood as changes in the space of possibilities, not only as changes in belief or mood content. Mary Warnock and David Cooper (the psychiatrist) appear as foils for how existential ideas entered Anglophone debate.
Interpersonal experience: three distortions
Building on Sartre's shame analysis, the authors distinguish forms of interpersonal change:
- Threat in everything. The other appears only as danger; space tightens.
- Cannot be affected. Others fail to solicit response; the field goes dead.
- Others not persons. Persons appear as objects or types; the second-person address collapses.
Each is both a bodily feeling and a changed sense of belonging. The clinical material (including interview testimony) is offered as phenomenological evidence, not as a random survey. Progress already flags the risk: a single interview and Laing-adjacent framing can over-generalize; the A closer look below keeps that caution.
Two clinical poles the chapter reads through possibility.
Structure of the possible
Heidegger's thrown projection supplies the grammar: I am ahead of myself in cares that already matter. In severe depression, mattering fails; the future feels identical with the present; time "stops". In some psychotic experience, possibilities are not merely reduced but restructured (uncanny significance, or emptied significance). The authors' conclusion is methodological: psychiatry needs descriptions of how the possible is lived, because symptom checklists alone miss the alteration that makes a life unlivable.
Ontological insecurity and shared possibility
Ratcliffe and Broome borrow ontological insecurity (Laing's phrase) for cases where the sense that the world is "there for me as well as him" fails, collapsing into "for him but not for me." Interview material includes loss phrased as "a feeling that something was taken from me": not only a belief change but a change in the field of the possible. Depression and schizophrenia-spectrum experience are not treated as identical; both are read as alterations of possibility-space that psychiatry must describe if it is to treat persons rather than checklists alone.
Ratcliffe and Broome clinical wager.
Testimony: Plath, Wolpert, Renée
The chapter's evidence includes literary and clinical first-person reports. Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar and Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness describe futures that will not differentiate; time becomes torment. Renée (Sechehaye's Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl) describes a world whose physiognomy dies, with parallels to Sartrean nausea before contingency. James on the feeling of reality, Tellenbach on melancholy, Stanghellini and Fuchs on corporealized/disembodied minds, and Broome on eternal recurrence of the same in depression, supply the phenomenological bookshelf. The method claim: if psychiatry ignores how the possible is lived, it misses the alteration that makes a life unlivable.
First-person evidence the chapter treats as phenomenological data.
Main Points
Main Points
- Existence precedes essence. Human beings have no fixed nature that settles who they are; Dasein's "essence" lies in its existence, and the self is a task (ch8, ch10).
- Existentialism is a family, not a label. Its members share a trajectory from estrangement, through the human world, to radical freedom and an ethics of reciprocal freedom (ch2).
- The self is a relation that must be held together. Kierkegaard's contradictory factors balance only through an unconditional commitment to something finite (ch4, ch5).
- The Other gives me an outside I must own. In the Look my possibilities "solidify", yet "I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am" (ch10, ch17).
- The body is not something I have but the self I am. My experience of myself is wholly that of a bodily self, my point of view on the world (ch13).
- Racism is a system, not only a gaze. Fanon and Sartre came to see racism as "a passive constitution in things before being an ideology" (ch16).
- The slogans still do work. Authenticity, commitment, Angst and the absurd reappear in moral psychology, Kantian ethics, pragmatism and feminism, often unnamed (ch1).
- Existentialism spread by association. Its cultural reach came through writers, artists and filmmakers drawn into its orbit as much as through influence (ch3).
- Some truths can only be communicated indirectly. Where there is no result to hand over, only the reader's own selfhood, the author must step aside (ch4).
- The death of God is a task, not a slogan. Nietzsche's naturalism and revaluation aim at a post-nihilist account of value grounded in life's enhancement (ch6).
- The self is a contest of drives. Nietzsche's self is a performance with no doer behind the deed; creativity is "dancing in chains" (ch7).
- Anxiety and death reveal that we have no essence. Authenticity is anticipatory resoluteness, not a heroic choice of values from nowhere (ch8).
- Heidegger's anti-humanism answers Sartre. The Letter on Humanism refuses every foundation, driven by an antinomy of Being already present in Being and Time (ch9).
- Consciousness is non-positional self-awareness. Abandon "contents of consciousness" and negation, freedom, anguish and bad faith follow (ch10).
- Freedom and socialism were Sartre's constant pair. His politics turns on the means-ends problem and a widening idea of situation (ch11).
- Freedoms are interdependent. For Beauvoir, "to will oneself free is also to will others free", and ambiguity is the human condition (ch12).
- Flesh grounds consciousness. Late Merleau-Ponty locates subjectivity in the reflexivity of the sensible (ch13).
- Existential literature is a genre. Distinguish the existentialist from the merely existential, and a line runs from Dostoevsky and Kafka through Camus to Beckett (ch14).
- Faith is a passion, not a doctrine. The existential question is how one is supposed to live; Kierkegaard and Marcel answer with faith, Nietzsche and Sartre with a strenuous atheism (ch15).
- The struggle against colonialism made existentialism dialectical. Fanon, critic of "Black Orpheus", ended by praising the Critique of Dialectical Reason (ch16).
- Psychiatric illness can alter the space of possibility. Threat in everything, the inability to be affected, and the loss of others as persons are three distinct changes (ch17).
- In depression the future stops differing from the present. Without affectability, the predicament loses its contingency and recovery seems inconceivable (ch17).
- Existential description can be tested. Patient and clinician testimony supports the phenomenologists' claims, the authors argue against Warnock (ch17).
Threads across the seventeen chapters
- Existence before essence is Cooper's slogan and Crowell's legacy test: commitment, resoluteness, engagement, practical identity.
- Self as relation (Kierkegaard/Pascal via Dreyfus; Nietzsche via Hatab's "no doer") blocks substance theories without erasing responsibility.
- Worldhood and flesh (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) make meaning bodily and public before it is mental.
- Freedom's social cost (Sartre's Look, Beauvoir's ambiguity, Flynn's career, Bernasconi's system) is the political hinge.
- Genre vs system (Malpas vs Cooper on Camus and literature) keeps the canon honest.
- Clinic and faith (Ratcliffe/Broome; Westphal) show the same structures of possibility and offense outside the café myth.
Synthesis map: from the Companion's problem to its four reach fields.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Existence before essence | What one is follows from how one takes up one's being | Someone explains a person by a fixed nature |
| Self as synthesis (Kierkegaard) | Opposed factors held together by commitment | A life feels pulled between necessity and possibility |
| Indirect communication | The author withdraws so the reader must choose | Teaching something that cannot be handed over as a result |
| Revaluation of values | Ask what a value does for life | A norm survives only by habit or authority |
| Anticipatory resoluteness | Own one's finitude and act within one's situation | Deciding without a guarantee |
| Bad faith | Flee freedom into facticity, or facticity into freedom | "That's just who I am" or "none of this is really me" |
| The Look | The Other turns me into an object and reveals my outside | Analysing shame, surveillance, social anxiety |
| Ethics of ambiguity | Being both consciousness and thing; my freedom needs yours | Weighing liberty against others' liberty |
| Body-subject | Perception is a bodily grip on a world of tasks | Designing for skill, habit or disability |
| Racism as system | Oppression is sedimented in things and institutions | Individual attitudes do not explain a persistent outcome |
| Space of possibility | Experience is shaped by kinds of things that can matter | Understanding depression or psychosis from the inside |
Cross-references: Nos. 01-06 and B3-19
- Existence precedes essence. Human beings have no fixed nature that settles who they are; Dasein's "essence" lies in its existence, and the self is a task (ch8, ch10).
- Existentialism is a family, not a label. Its members share a trajectory from estrangement, through the human world, to radical freedom and an ethics of reciprocal freedom (ch2).
- The self is a relation that must be held together. Kierkegaard's contradictory factors balance only through an unconditional commitment to something finite (ch4, ch5).
- The Other gives me an outside I must own. In the Look my possibilities "solidify", yet "I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am" (ch10, ch17).
- The body is not something I have but the self I am. My experience of myself is wholly that of a bodily self, my point of view on the world (ch13).
- Racism is a system, not only a gaze. Fanon and Sartre came to see racism as "a passive constitution in things before being an ideology" (ch16).