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Existentialism
Existentialism
• Existentialism is the philosophy that individuals
create their own meaning in their lives, as
opposed to having a deity or higher power
creating it for them. Existentialists believe that
life has no meaning because we are all here for
no reason other than the fact that our parents
gave birth to us. Accepting that life is
meaningless means that there is no real reason
to live, and this causes a major crisis for the
existentialist. What is the point of living if we all
die anyway?
Existentialism
• Kierkegaard—The individual
is responsible for giving life
meaning.
• Life should be lived sincerely
and passionately in spite of
obstacles—despair, absurdity,
alienation, and boredom.
• Emphasis on concrete,
human experience—a
reaction against the
abstraction of humanity
resulting from science and
philosophy.
Sartre
• Limitless and therefore anxiety-producing human
freedom.
• Life is a series of situations requiring choices and acts;
the acts that one chooses determine what one is.
• Humanity is not given being, but only existence. There
is no God. No absolute standards. Each person must
create his or her own morality and truth—must create
their own being out of existence.
• Awareness comes first, then a Nietzschean “reevaluation of all values.” But there is no
superman. Only the individual.
Existentialism
• Plato’s psyche.
• Existentialism insists on
reuniting the lower, irrational
parts of the psyche with
reason, taking the whole
human into account. Man
contains intellect, but also
guilt, anxiety, and passionate
drives. This image of the
human is a complicated being
full of contradictions and
tensions.
Existentialism--Themes
1. The importance of the individual: “What does it
mean to be existing as a human being?
– How do you conduct in a meaningful way of life in a
world where all purpose seems obscure?
– In the midst of an unstable world, it becomes
imperative to “be an individual.”
Existentialism--Themes
2. The importance of choice: we are made
up of, or formed by, our experiences.
– Subjectivity: “We cannot appeal to law or
tradition to furnish decisions for life choices.
We must make our choices on our own.
Choice
• Existentialists write about the
widening range of human
freedoms.
• Sartre--we are condemned to
freedom. Because there is no God,
we must accept individual
responsibility for our own
becoming. Nothing explicitly
implies that in becoming a free
individual one becomes a virtuous
person.
• Freedom is the acceptance of
responsibility for choice and a
commitment to one’s choice.
• The acts that one chooses
determine what one is.
Existence Precedes Essence
 Human life is understandable only in terms of an
individual man’s existence, his particular experience of
life. A man lives rather than is, and every man’s
experience is unique, radically different from everyone
else’s and can be understood truly only in terms of his
involvement in life or commitment to it.
 there is no universal of human nature of which each
man is only one example. Don’t ask “What is
mankind?” Ask: “Who am I?”
 The existentialist insists that each person is unique. He
is an entire universe—the center of infinity.
3. Anxiety regarding life, death and extreme
situations.
– Lost optimism from the Age of Enlightenment
that problems can be solved through reason,
science. Nature can be “conquered.”
Anxiety and Fear
• “Our tragedy today is a
general and universal
physical fear so long
sustained by now that we
can even bear it. There
are no longer problems
of the spirit. There is
only one question: When
will I be blown up?” –
William Faulkner, from
his Nobel Prize speech.
Anxiety and Fear
• Lost optimism from the
age of enlightenment.
Less faith in reason. Was
the war reasonable?
• Think about life today.
What are our common
fears and anxieties?
• Too many moral choices.
Ethical questions are
primarily first person.
Existentialism--Themes
4. Authenticity
– “We need to face up to our situation rather
than making things worse with self-deceptive
approaches to religion, metaphysics, morality,
or science.”
– “We need to be honest with ourselves and
make decisions courageously; the key to this
is accepting our own limitations and realizing
that we cannot achieve certainty in the
making of such decisions.”
Existentialism--Themes
5. Social Criticism
– “Existentialist literature often carried out this
unmasking of convention and social patterns
with enormous effect (especially in the novels
of Camus).”
5. Absurdity
• “Sartre spoke of an
unfulfillable desire for
complete fulfillment.”
• Life is absurd, and
reason has no power
to penetrate the
depths of human life.
• There are “dark
places” in human life
that do not involve
reason.
Absurdity
• We are forced to ask ultimate questions by
the very nature of our lives and by our
yearning for orientation and purpose in our
lives, yet decisive answers prove
unachievable.
• Meaning must therefore be constructed
through courageous choice in the face of
this absurd situation.
Absurdity
• This kind of choice cannot be understood as
achieving moral certainty; rather it is moral
heroism within an essentially morally vague and
chaotic world.
• Existentialists found strength in the undominatable
human spirit. They resisted even during torture. “I can
say no, therefore I exist.”
6. Alienation and Estrangement
• We live in alienation from God, nature, and other men.
Man has been collectivized by science, and separated
from his sense of individuality.
-crowded cities
-subdivision of labor
-centralized government
-advertising, propaganda, the mass media
• All of these things destroy individuality and make us
live on the surface of life, content to deal with things
and not people.
7. Nothingness
• If man is alienated from self, God, nature, and
other men, what is left?
• Why do people who have “everything” feel
empty and discontent?
• Nothingness is the “placeholder of possibility.”
It is the awareness of anything that is not your
own existence—what you are not, and what you
could become.
Sources
• Witt, The Humanities
• soma.sbcc.edu/.../LectureNotes_La%20Je
tee_Existentialism.pdf
• http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWild
Web/courses/wphil/lectures/wphil_theme2
0.htm
• http://www.viterbo.edu/perspgs/faculty/GS
mith/Existentialism.htm