They are still right about this. Contrary to general belief, Sartre and De Beauvoir did not generally toe a party line, although they kicked a few around. Sartre briefly considered himself a communist convert in the early s, especially after a bizarre incident in which the French Communist party leader, Jacques Duclos, was arrested and held for a month after being caught in a car containing two dead pigeons. The authorities thought the birds had been intended for taking messages to Moscow; Duclos said he was taking them home to cook for dinner.
He defended the party by writing articles, but even now he did not sign up. On their side, the communists never accepted existentialism. They disliked its insistence on freedom: how could a load of haywire existentialists ever contribute to a properly organised collective revolution? They feared that reading atheist existentialists would lead people to doubt their faith and church authority — which it did. Existentialism inclines people to doubt and challenge almost everything — even if its own practitioners sometimes took a while to see this.
A rarely noted fact about existentialists and their allies is that they wrote some wonderful books — along with some dreadful ones. Camus is famously readable: he deliberately modelled his novel The Outsider on jagged American crime stories, rather than on the poised elegance of high French literature.
De Beauvoir created gripping psychological fiction out of the real-life dramas and discussions raging among her friends, and she encouraged Sartre to make his Nausea more like a whodunnit than a treatise. Actually, even his treatises had novelistic qualities. He incorporated many personal experiences into his masterwork Being and Nothingness , often to startling effect, since his perspective included peculiar hangups about trees, ski tracks, honey and slimy things, and terrifying post-mescaline flashbacks in which he was pursued by imaginary lobsters.
As for Heidegger, his writing affords different kind of pleasure — although that word is not often mentioned in relation to his books. He wrote them in a style filled with idiosyncratic coinages.
The idea is to keep us from slipping lazily into traditional habits and errors of thought. They and their phenomenological friends often took topics previously considered on the fringes of philosophy, such as the body, gender, sexuality, social life, child development and our relationship with technology, and brought them into the very centre of their thought.
Take technology. Heidegger was a pioneer in noticing how much it has changed the very nature of human experience. That is, it has nothing to do with making machines more user-friendly or efficient or productive. The real question is about our own way of being: investigating technology takes us into deep questions about how we work, how we occupy the Earth and who we are. He also warned against our endless desire to make everything on the planet more exploitable and storable. Fifteen years after these words were published, many of us are already so immersed in that network that we can hardly find a separate vantage point from which to think critically about it.
Heidegger is there to remind us not just to question the technology itself, but to question ourselves. Unlike some later continental philosophers, besotted with the play of meanings in texts and uninterested in real people, the existentialists went directly for the biggest and most personal questions.
What are we? What makes us different from other animals? What is freedom? How do we interact? What world do we want to create for the future? What responsibilities do we have?
What do we do? Sartre was self-indulgent and demanding, and he defended odious regimes, if only fleetingly. Heidegger, as is now well documented, was a nationalist and Nazi sympathiser who probably remained one long after the war. Almost everyone in the existentialist story displayed some qualities that should make us uncomfortable. But they do offer something more useful: they were interesting thinkers.
They remind us that existence is difficult and that people behave appallingly, but at the same time they point out how vast our human possibilities are. That is why we might pick up some inspiring ideas from reading them again — and why we might even try being just a little more existentialist ourselves. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Why do I exist? For thousands of years, these questions were happily answered by the belief your purpose in life was assigned prior to your creation.
The existentialists, however, disagreed. Existentialism is the philosophical belief we are each responsible for creating purpose or meaning in our own lives. Our individual purpose and meaning is not given to us by Gods, governments, teachers or other authorities. In order to fully understand the thinking that underpins existentialism, we must first explore the idea it contradicts — essentialism.
Essentialism was founded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle who posited everything had an essence, including us. It could have pictures or words or be blank, be paperback or hardcover, tell a fictional story or provide factual information. Without pages though, it would cease to be a book. Aristotle claimed essence is created prior to existence. This idea seems to imply, whether you are aware of it or not, your purpose in life has been gifted to you prior to your birth.
And as you live your life, the decisions you make on a daily basis are contributing to your ultimate purpose, whatever that happens to be. This was an immensely popular belief for thousands of years and gave considerable weight to religious thought that placed emphasis on an omnipotent God who created each being with a predetermined plan in mind. Your God already provided it for you. As people questioned how something as catastrophically terrible as the Holocaust could have a predetermined purpose, existentialism provided a possible answer that perhaps it is the individual who determines their essence, not an omnipotent being.
While not necessarily atheist, existentialists believed there is no divine intervention, fate or outside forces actively pushing you in particular directions. Every decision you make is yours. You create your own purpose through your actions.
Many of us experience the so called existential crisis where we find ourselves questioning our choices, career, relationships and the point of it all.
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? The above sentences are very far from constituting a cheerful declaration: no one is happy here!
Nietzsche is not naive and because he is not naive he is rather pessimistic. What the death of God really announces is the demise of the human as we know it. One has to think of this break in the history of the human in Kantian terms.
Similarly Nietzsche believes that the demise of the divine could be the opportunity for the emergence of a being which derives the meaning of its existence from within itself and not from some authority external to it. If the meaning of the human derived from God then, with the universe empty, man cannot take the place of the absent God.
This empty space can only be filled by something greater and fuller, which in the Nietzschean jargon means the greatest unity of contradictory forces. Nietzsche was by training a Klassische Philologe the rough equivalent Anglosaxon would be an expert in classics — the texts of the ancient Greek and Roman authors.
Perhaps because of his close acquaintance with the ancient writers, he became sensitive to a quite different understanding of philosophical thinking to that of his contemporaries. For the Greeks, philosophical questioning takes place within the perspective of a certain choice of life.
Philosophical speculation is the result of a certain way of life and the attempted justification of this life. The point is not always to speculate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge.
Philosophical concepts are valuable insofar as they serve a flourishing life, not as academic exercises. Under the new model of philosophy the old metaphysical and moral questions are to be replaced by new questions concerning history, genealogy, environmental conditions and so forth. What is Nietzsche telling us here? Two things: firstly that, following the tradition of Spinoza, the movement from transcendence to immanence passes through the rehabilitation of the body. To say that, however, does not imply a simple-minded materialism.
This archetypical body is indeed as yet unknown and we stand in ignorance of its abilities. The second thing that Nietzsche is telling us in the above passage is that this new immanent philosophy necessarily requires a new ethics. One has to be clear here because of the many misunderstandings of Nietzschean ethics.
Nietzsche is primarily a philosopher of ethics but ethics here refers to the possible justification of a way of life, which way of life in turn justifies human existence on earth. Morality, which Nietzsche rejects, refers to the obsessive need a need or an instinct can also be learned according to Nietzsche of the human to preserve its own species and to regard its species as higher than the other animals.
In short morality is arrogant. A Nietzschean ethics is an ethics of modesty. It places the human back where it belongs, among the other animals.
However to say that is not to equate the human with the animal. Unlike non-human animals men are products of history that is to say products of memory. That is their burden and their responsibility. In the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche explains morality as a system aiming at the taming of the human animal. Heidegger exercised an unparalleled influence on modern thought. Without knowledge of his work recent developments in modern European philosophy Sartre, Gadamer, Arendt, Marcuse, Derrida, Foucault et al.
He remains notorious for his involvement with National Socialism in the s. Outside European philosophy, Heidegger is only occasionally taken seriously, and is sometimes actually ridiculed famously the Oxford philosopher A. In , Jean Beaufret in a letter to Heidegger poses a number of questions concerning the link between humanism and the recent developments of existentialist philosophy in France. There he repudiates any possible connection of his philosophy with the existentialism of Sartre.
The answer here is that Heidegger can be classified as an existentialist thinker despite all his differences from Sartre. We have seen above that a principle concern of all existentialists was to affirm the priority of individual existence and to stress that human existence is to be investigated with methods other than those of the natural sciences.
His magnum opus Being and Time is an investigation into the meaning of Being as that manifests itself through the human being, Dasein.
This question is what is the meaning of that Being which is not an entity like other beings, for example a chair, a car, a rock and yet through it entities have meaning at all? Investigating the question of the meaning of Being we discover that it arises only because it is made possible by the human being which poses the question.
Dasein has already a pre-conceptual understanding of Being because it is the place where Being manifests itself.
Unlike the traditional understanding of the human as a hypokeimenon Aristotle — what through the filtering of Greek thought by the Romans becomes substantia, that which supports all entities and qualities as their base and their ground — Dasein refers to the way which human beings are. This is why human beings locate a place which nevertheless remains unstable and unfixed. The virtual place that Dasein occupies is not empty.
It is filled with beings which ontologically structure the very possibility of Dasein. Dasein exists as in-the-world. World is not something separate from Dasein; rather, Dasein cannot be understood outside the referential totality which constitutes it. Heidegger repeats here a familiar existentialist pattern regarding the situatedness of experience. Sartre, by contrast, comes from the tradition of Descartes and to this tradition remains faithful.
Sartre, following Descartes, thinks of the human as a substance producing or sustaining entities, Heidegger on the contrary thinks of the human as a passivity which accepts the call of Being. For Kierkegaard anxiety defines the possibility of responsibility, the exodus of man from the innocence of Eden and his participation to history. But the birthplace of anxiety is the experience of nothingness, the state in which every entity is experienced as withdrawn from its functionality.
In anxiety we do not fear something in particular but we experience the terror of a vacuum in which is existence is thrown. Existentialist thinkers are interested in anxiety because anxiety individualizes one it is when I feel Angst more than everything that I come face to face with my own individual existence as distinct from all other entities around me. Man is not a thinking thing de-associated from the world, as in Cartesian metaphysics, but a being which finds itself in various moods such as anxiety or boredom.
Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger also believes that anxiety is born out of the terror of nothingness. In this article we have discussed the ambiguous or at times downright critical attitude of many existentialists toward the uncritical and unreflecting masses of people who, in a wholly anti-Kantian and thus also anti-Enlightenment move, locate the meaning of their existence in an external authority. They thus give up their purported autonomy as rational beings.
For Heidegger, Dasein for the most part lives inauthentically in that Dasein is absorbed in a way of life produced by others, not by Dasein itself.
Heidegger was a highly original thinker. His project was nothing less than the overcoming of Western metaphysics through the positing of the forgotten question of being.
He stands in a critical relation to past philosophers but simultaneously he is heavily indebted to them, much more than he would like to admit. This is not to question his originality, it is to recognize that thought is not an ex nihilo production; it comes as a response to things past, and aims towards what is made possible through that past.
In the public consciousness, at least, Sartre must surely be the central figure of existentialism. All the themes that we introduced above come together in his work. Although uncomfortable in the limelight, he was nevertheless the very model of a public intellectual, writing hundreds of short pieces for public dissemination and taking resolutely independent and often controversial stands on major political events. From the s onwards, Sartre moved his existentialism towards a philosophy the purpose of which was to understand the possibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics.
Sartre was in his late 20s when he first encountered phenomenology, specifically the philosophical ideas of Edmund Husserl. We should point out that Heidegger was also deeply influenced by Husserl, but it is less obvious in the language he employs because he drops the language of consciousness and acts. Rather, consciousness is nothing but a directedness towards things. Sartre found a nice way to sum up the notion of the intentional object: If I love her, I love her because she is lovable Sartre Within my experience, her lovableness is not an aspect of my image of her, rather it is a feature of her and ultimately a part of the world towards which my consciousness directs itself.
The notion that consciousness is not a thing is vital to Sartre. Indeed, consciousness is primarily to be characterised as nothing : it is first and foremost not that which it is conscious of. Because it is not a thing, it is not subject to the laws of things; specifically, it is not part of a chain of causes and its identity is not akin to that of a substance. Above we suggested that a concern with the nature of existence, and more particularly a concern with the distinctive nature of human existence, are defining existentialist themes.
Moreover, qua consciousness, and not a thing that is part of the causal chain, I am free. From moment to moment, my every action is mine alone to choose. However, again, I am first and foremost not my situation. Thus, at every moment I choose whether to continue on that life path, or to be something else. Thus, my existence the mere fact that I am is prior to my essence what I make of myself through my free choices.
I am thus utterly responsible for myself. If my act is not simply whatever happens to come to mind, then my action may embody a more general principle of action. This principle too is one that I must have freely chosen and committed myself to.
It is an image of the type of life that I believe has value. In these ways, Sartre intersects with the broadly Kantian account of freedom which we introduced above in our thematic section.
As situated, I also find myself surrounded by such images — from religion, culture, politics or morality — but none compels my freedom.
I exist as freedom, primarily characterised as not determined, so my continuing existence requires the ever renewed exercise of freedom thus, in our thematic discussion above, the notion from Spinoza and Leibniz of existence as a striving-to-exist. Thus also, my non-existence, and the non-existence of everything I believe in, is only a free choice away. I am alone in my responsibility; my existence, relative to everything external that might give it meaning, is absurd. Nietzsche and Heidegger, in contrast, view such a conception of freedom as naively metaphysical.
Suppose, however, that at some point I am conscious of myself in a thing-like way. In that case I am existing in denial of my distinctively human mode of existence; I am fleeing from my freedom. As we shall see, inauthenticity is not just an occasional pitfall of human life, but essential to it. Human existence is a constant falling away from an authentic recognition of its freedom.
Sartre here thus echoes the notion in Heidegger than inauthenticity is a condition of possibility of human existence. Intentionality manifests itself in another important way. Rarely if ever am I simply observing the world; instead I am involved in wanting to do something, I have a goal or purpose.
Here, intentional consciousness is not a static directedness towards things, but is rather an active projection towards the future. Suppose that I undertake as my project marrying my beloved. This is an intentional relation to a future state of affairs.
As free, I commit myself to this project and must reaffirm that commitment at every moment. It is part of my life project, the image of human life that I offer to myself and to others as something of value. Notice, however, that my project involves inauthenticity. Thus there is an essential tension to all projection. On the one hand, the mere fact that I project myself into the future is emblematic of my freedom; only a radically free consciousness can project itself.
I exist as projecting towards the future which, again, I am not. Thus, I am in the sense of an authentic self what I am not because my projecting is always underway towards the future. On the other hand, in projecting I am projecting myself as something , that is, as a thing that no longer projects, has no future, is not free.
Every action, then, is both an expression of freedom and also a snare of freedom. Projection is absurd: I seek to become the impossible object, for-itself-in-itself, a thing that is both free and a mere thing. Born of this tension is a recognition of freedom, what it entails, and its essential fragility. Thus, once again, we encounter existential anxiety.
This too, though, is an objectification. Within my intentional gaze, she is loveable in much the same way that granite is hard or heavy. Insofar as I am in love, then, I seek to deny her freedom. Insofar, however, as I wish to be loved by her, then she must be free to choose me as her beloved.
If she is free, she escapes my love; if not, she cannot love. Love here is a case study in the basic forms of social relation. Sartre is thus moving from an entirely individualistic frame of reference my self, my freedom and my projects towards a consideration of the self in concrete relations with others. Sartre is working through — in a way he would shortly see as being inadequate — the issues presented by the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, which we mentioned above.
A few years later at the end of the s, Sartre wrote what has been published as Notebooks for an Ethics. Sartre influenced in the meantime by the criticisms of Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir, and by his increasing commitment to collectivist politics elaborated greatly his existentialist account of relations with others, taking the Hegelian idea more seriously. He no longer thinks of concrete relations so pessimistically. While Nietzsche and Heidegger both suggest the possibility of an authentic being with others, both leave it seriously under-developed.
For our purposes, there are two key ideas in the Notebooks. The first is that my projects can be realised only with the cooperation of others; however, that cooperation presupposes their freedom I cannot make her love me , and their judgements about me must concern me. Therefore permitting and nurturing the freedom of others must be a central part of all my projects. Sartre thus commits himself against any political, social or economic forms of subjugation.
An authentic existence, for Sartre, therefore means two things. Second, though, there is some minimal level of content to any authentic project: whatever else my project is, it must also be a project of freedom, for myself and for others. Subsequently a star Normalienne , she was a writer, philosopher, feminist, lifelong partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, notorious for her anti-bourgeois way of living and her free sexual relationships which included among others a passionate affair with the American writer Nelson Algren.
The debate rests of course upon the fundamental misconception that wants a body of work to exist and develop independently of or uninfluenced by its intellectual environment.
In Being and Nothingness , the groundwork of the Existentialist movement in France was published. There Sartre gave an account of freedom as ontological constitutive of the subject. One cannot but be free: this is the kernel of the Sartrean conception of freedom. One cannot assume freedom in isolation from the freedom of others. Moreover action takes place within a certain historical context. For Merleau-Ponty the subjective free-will is always in a dialectical relationship with its historical context.
Like Sartre it is only later in her life that this will be acknowledged. In Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir offers a picture of the human subject as constantly oscillating between facticity and transcendence.
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