Understanding Existentialism

Existentialism
Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 2, SPECIAL ISSUE WITH THE
SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY (2012), pp. 247-267
Published by: Penn State University Press
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50
th
anniversary sessions: then and now
Existentialism
Toward the Concrete

Thomas R. Flynn
emory university
While I was a graduate student at Columbia during the interesting years

of 196870, Lucien Goldmann of Le Dieu Cach fame was a guest professor
(in sociology and French, to be sure, not in philosophy).1 I attended his
course on Sartres theater in the Department of French. One day out of the
blue, Goldmann asked the class when existentialism began. What a curious
question, I thought. Is he looking for Pascal, or Augustine, or perhaps even
Socrates? He relieved our silence with 1910, which turned out to be the
year that Lukcs published Soul and Form.2 Goldmann was a great admirer
of Gergy Lukcs.
There are a lot of possibilities for the starting date of existentialism,
whether it be Karl Jasperss expounding Eksistenzphilosophie (1938) or his
even earlier conversation with his friend Erich Frank about Kierkegaard
(July 1914).3 One might cite Gabriel Marcels calling Sartre an existentialist at one of his jeudis chez Marcel, where the younger philosophical
equivalent of le Tout-Paris used to gather to philosophize and network.
But regardless of the chronology, one of the books that had a directive
effect on the existentialist movementone that I think captured its spirit
and drivewas Jean Wahls Vers le concret, subtitled Studies in the History
journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012
Copyright 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 247
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anniversary sessions
of Contemporary Philosophy (1932).4 Not only did it impress both Sartre and
Beauvoir, who referred to it several times in their writings, but it seemed
to have focused their attention and that of others seeking a new philosophy
to address the contingency of our concrete existence as opposed to what
Sartre called the digestive neo-Kantian idealism of their Sorbonne
professors. Not coincidentally, Wahls study discussed the philosophies
of Alfred North Whitehead, William James, and Gabriel Marcel. Of the
many candidates for the distinguishing feature of existentialist philosophy,
I would propose this pursuit of the concrete. Certainly, Sartres attraction
to Husserlian phenomenology was motivated by this concern. Recall
Beauvoirs story of his discovering Husserlian phenomenology upon
Raymond Arons assurance that it would enable him to make philosophy
out of his perception of the apricot cocktail glass before them. Whatever
one thinks of this tale, it is clear that the organization and exposition of
Being and Nothingness, as Joseph Catalano has pointed out, was geared to
rendering ontologically possible an existential psychoanalysis that in turn
would issue in the existential biographies of Baudelaire, Malarm, Genet,
and, above all, his multivolume study of Gustave Flaubert, The Family
Idiot. These are all attempts to grasp what Sartre would subsequently call
the singular universal, in effect, the concrete. In the same vein, Marcel
entitled one of the essays in his Creative Fidelity An Outline of a Concrete
Philosophy(1940).
Mention of Whitehead, James, and Marcel is not coincidental. The
migration of French and more broadly European existentialism to our
shores was eased by a Pragmatism that softened the Yankee suspicion of
abstractions and also fostered by process philosophy, with its critique of
the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and its openness to a more fluid
metaphysics. Im not saying that there was an easy exchange among pragmatists, process philosophers, and existentialists. Some of the problems
are exhibited in the fallout of John Wildes move from the Metaphysical
Society of America (MSA), which was not only neo-Aristotelian but processive under the direction of its founder and Wilds Yale colleague, Paul
Weiss. It would be interesting to know what their conversations, if any,
might have been while on the same campus. As someone who straddles
membership in both the MSA and the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy (SPEP) to this day, I recall hearing that Wild, whose
work I respected under both descriptions, was especially harsh on his
former friends at the MSA once he left their company.
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Existential Philosophy Then

As Robert Scharff pointed out in the opening session of our commemorative celebration, there was something significant at stake in the insistence
on the expression Existential Philosophy rather than Existentialism
in the title of SPEP at its inception. It had to do with the frequent dismissal of existentialism as a purely cultural phenomenon, the expression of
postwar Left Bank anguish and narcissism. In fact, even an admired former
colleague and distinguished phenomenologist once spoke rather ironically
about fellow phenomenologists splashing about in the Lifeworld! When
teaching the subject, I have long seen my task as showing the students that
existentialism is a philosophical movement with literary applications rather
than a literary movement with philosophical pretensions. That Sartres
Nausea and Camuss The Stranger and The Plague are philosophical novels
is beyond doubt. And that the authors of each were awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature is a matter of record (of course, Sartre turned his down). But
the power of what Aristotle called the well formed phantasm to generate
a concept or better, a Hegelian Begriff was never lost on Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Marcel, or Sartre, all of whom I would call philosophers of the
imaginary. When criticized for presenting his plays in the bourgeois center of the city rather than in venues on the proletarian periphery, Sartre
replied: No bourgeois can leave a presentation of one of my plays without
having thought thoughts traitorous to his class. An example of what
Sren Kierkegaard called oblique communication, this is an instance of
concrete thinking. But it is this close association of existential thought with
its imaginative expression that renders it suspect in some circles, where
the preference is for the silhouette rather than the impressionist portrait.
If one read French, German, or Italian in the 1940s and 1950s, there
were several introductory, survey studies of existentialist thought available
prior to the founding of SPEP in 1961. Examples include Luigi Pareysons
Studi sull esistenzialismo (1943), Otto Bulnows Deutsche Existenzphilosophie
(1953), and Jean Wahl, Les Philosophies de lexistence (1954). Bibliographies
were appearing in several languages:
J. Grard, A. de Waelhens, and J. Lemeere, Bibliographie sur
lexistentialism, Revue international de philosophie, July 1949, with
an addendum on Italian works on existentialism in the same revue,
October 1949;
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Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism (1949); and

R. H. Brown, Existentialism. A Bibliography, Modern Schoolman
31 (November 1953).
Quite a number of books and essays on existentialist themes began to
appear in the mid-1940s and 1950s. Among the earliest studies in English
was Aron Gurwitschs A Non-egological Conception of Consciousness,
in the first volume of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1941).
Parenthetically, we should not neglect what could be called the Buffalo
school of Continental thought, where that journal continues to be published, or Marvin Farber of that faculty, who edited Philosophic Thought in
France and the United States (1950). See also the following:
William Barrett, What Is Existentialism? (1947);
Emmanuel Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies (1948);
Marjorie Green, Dreadful Freedom (1948);
A Critical Bibliography of Existentialism (the Parisian School),
special issue of Yale French Studies (1950);
Helmut Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness (1951);
H. J. Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers (1951);
Maurice Natanson, A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartres Ontology (1951);
Kurt Reinhardt, The Existentialist Revolt (1952);
James Collins, The Existentialists (1952);
E. L. Allen, Existentialism from Within (1953);
Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953);
Wilfred Desan, The Tragic Finale (1954);
John Wild, The Challenge of Existentialism (1955);
Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956); and
William Barrett, Irrational Man (1958).
Herbert Spiegelberg collected and in a sense synthesized this material in
his two-volume The Phenomenological Movement (1960).
Renditions of major works include translations of Sartres The
Emotions: Outline of a Theory, Psychology of the Imagination, Existentialism
and Humanism, and Anti-Semite and Jew (all four in 1948) and What Is
Literature? (1949), as well as the following:
Hazel Barnes, Sartres Being and Nothingness (1956);
Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics? (1949) and Being and Time (1962);
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Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), In Praise of

Philosophy (1963), and The Structure of Behavior (1963);
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947);
William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought
(1963); and
Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Annotated Bibliography of
Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 vols. (1974).
I would like to mention a couple of anthologies from subsequent
yearsactually subsequent decadesbecause they illustrate how the
existentialist field in particular but the phenomenological field in general
had expanded in the Anglosaxophone world, as the French like to say,
since the appearance of SPEP and perhaps because of it; for all of the
individuals contributing to these volumes are or were before their deaths
active members of the society. The first is George Schraders Existentialist
Thinkers: Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty (1967), by eight prominent members of what one might call the Yale school of existentialist thought.
The second example is James Watsons Portraits of American Continental
Philosophers, thirty years later (1999). I mention the first because it is a
clear picture of the Yale school and the latter because, of the twenty-two
philosophers presented, three of whom have died, seventeen are listed on
the program for the fiftieth anniversary of SPEP.
Numerous publications such as Studies in Phenomenology, the
Continental Philosophy Review, Sartre Studies International, the International
Philosophical Quarterly (a joint publication between Fordham and the Jesuit
faculty at Louvain), the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, and
just to be ecumenical, the Review of Metaphysics (long associated with its
founder, Paul Weiss, and the MSA), to name but a fewsuch established
and respected journals witness the continued strength and relevance of
existential phenomenology in the English-speaking world. One could
survey this material by means of graduate programs that pay considerable attention to existentialist theses and themes. Certainly the New
School figures prominently there, as do Yale, Pennsylvania State, and
Northwestern universities for historical reasons. Among Catholic institutions Boston College, Fordham, Duquesne, and St. Louis University would
rank high in those days, with James Collins already mentioned and Alden
Fishers translation of Merleau-Pontys The Structure of Behavior (1963)
counted among them.
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But one could survey the material in terms of the issues that
e xistentialist considerations brought to the table in its conversations with
other major philosophies of the day, especially Marxism in its various
guises. To be sure, there were closer fields for internecine warfare, with
personalists, pragmatists, and Thomists, for example, but the exchange
that received the most attention was the ongoing struggle with Marxism,
especially hard-line Soviet-style Communism that began in the streets and
cafs of Left Bank Paris in the mid-1940s and ended in the same locales in
1968. Irecall two graffiti from the events of 1968 that caught my attention
in this respect: All power to the imagination (a critique of the French
Communist Party, which, Sartre insisted to his Maoist friends, lacked imagination) and Structures dont take to the streets (a thinly veiled attack
on Althusserian Marxism). The issue was existential humanism. Curiously,
this is a matter that has returned in post-poststructuralist critiques of a
sclerotic existentialism on the part of many critics today, including
some members of SPEP. Let me focus on the Parisian frame of the debate
because much of it reverberated in American locales, especially during the
late 1960s and early 1970s.
In the immediate postwar years, the question was theoretical but
particularly strategic: how to win the minds of the youth coming of age in
the immediate postwar era. The French Communist Party survived the war
with a chiefly positive image thanks to the courage of many of its members
in the Resistance. The party saw existentialist philosophy as a warmed-over
bourgeois individualism that had little new or relevant to offer the next
generation. The existentialist response was stated in the Presentation
of Les temps modernes and broadcast, somewhat regrettably, in the lecture
advertised as Is Existentialism a Humanism? (1946). It was elaborated in
subsequent publications like What Is Literature? (1947) and given impressive ontological grounding in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).
Raymond Aron said of this project, from which he distanced himself,
that it undertook the impossible task of uniting Kierkegaard and Marx. In a
sense, he was right. This was the enterprise to which Sartre was committed.
But Aron sold him short when it came to the social ontology of the Critique
of Dialectical Reason. So, too, did his erstwhile friend and colleague at Les
temps modernes, Merleau-Ponty, in his uncharacteristically harsh book The
Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Could existentialism formulate a social
theory in response to its Marxist critics without abandoning what was most
properly its ownits abiding sense of individual moral responsibility?
Ihave argued elsewhere that Sartre could indeed, as he put it, reintroduce
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man into Marxism, that is, pace Aron, unite Kierkegaard and Marx. His
key was exchanging consciousness for praxis, static descriptions for dialectical relations, and turning the whole on the ontological theory of the
mediating third party.5
Concomitant with this discussion was the primacy of free organic
praxis, the nature and force of what Althusser called structural causality
and the very notion of a meaning/direction (sens) to history. Again my
point in mentioning this controversy is that it was played out by various
authors and in different media on this side of the Atlantic. Ron Aronson,
Bill McBride, James Marsch, Bill Martin, Doug Kellner, Betsy Bowman,
Bob Stone, and Fredrick Jameson as well as my own Doktorvater, Robert
Cumming, are names that immediately come to mind. And the New
Left Review in addition to the above-mentioned publications devoted a
considerable amount of space to the issue over the years.
So much for existentialism then. How does it fare today? The
E still stands proud, if somewhat chastened, in the heading of SPEP.
Does it deserve more than historical honorable mention before retiring
(along with its adherents/supporters) to the golden shores of lotus-eaters,
nut-gatherers, and extinct volcanoes? Many of its themes are perennial
even if their specific spin has changed. The basic issues of the individual
and the social, of citizen and government, of biography and history, despite
their respective vestures, are still recognizable in the antiWall Street
movement, for instance.
Existentialist Philosophy Now?

There are as many areas of existentialist relevance today as there are fields
of moral responsibility, especially creative moral responsibility. This
harkens back to Sartres advice in Existentialism Is a Humanism to the
young person with the moral dilemma of choosing between faithfulness
to his widowed mother and loyalty to his countrythe kind of cases that
existentialists have traditionally specialized in and the things that novels
and movies are made of. Choose, he counsels, that is, invent.6 Thereis
obviously a continued need for the existentialist virtue of authenticity and
its disvalue of bad faith in current ethical discourse. Doubtless, this fits
existentialism as a style of life (as Nietzsche and Foucault might say). But it
has always supported a content as wellthough that content, freedom,
has expanded and deepened as Sartres thought grew more contextual
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and concrete. I am not going to pursue this tack because it invites, even
demands, ramification into contemporary issues of feminism, racism, neocolonialism, environmental study, globalization, and others that exceed the
scope of my talk but not the interests of the audience. I would reserve these
corollaries to the basic question of humanism and its supposedly unsalvageable, harm-producing connotationsan implicit attack on coffee-table
existentialismfor another time.
Rather, I wish to raise another philosophical topic of ancient interest that
has returned to challenge us in our very notion of what philosophy is and
should be doing today. I have in mind what has come to be called by Pierre
Hadot, Michel Foucault, and others Philosophy as a Way of Life.7 In his last
lectures at the Collge de France, Foucault, with explicit reference to Hadot,
distinguished the Socratic ideal of care of the self from the Platonic-Delphic
model of Know thyself, insisting that such self-knowledge grew increasingly abstract and antiseptic as philosophy became more professionalized
and beholden to the model of the natural sciences in its concept of its goal
and how it should pursue it. The Socratic ideal of self-care, on the other
hand, became increasingly separated from the professional philosophical
model and instead was assumed by spiritual directors, confessors, political
commissars, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. Though Hadot took issue
with Foucaults sharp distinction and separation of this contrast, he agreed
that ancient philosophy up to and including the Stoics and Epicureans was
less about information and more about personal formation.
Foucault implicitly, as I recall, and Hadot explicitly cite Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, and the existentialists as philosophers who have retained
that formative view of their teaching. Foucault granted that the German
Romantics and Hegel combined the formative and informative dimensions
as well. It is this role of existentialist thought in various guises that I
propose as a hopeful beacon for its revival in the twenty-first century after
suffering eclipse by structuralist, poststructuralist, and possibly even
post-poststructuralist philosophies over the last decades. That said, you
can imagine the surprise and the renewed hope I felt when I received the
first official announcement for the next World Congress of Philosophy
scheduled for Athens in 2013. The officers of the International Federation
of Philosophical Societies that sponsors these gatherings selected as the
theme for the entire meeting Philosophy as Inquiry and Way of Life.
Suffice it to say in virtue of the foregoing that existentialism has indeed
survived. After all that has occurred in the philosophical world over the last
half century, fifty/fifty is not a bad split!
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notes
1. Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God, trans. Philip Thody (1955; New York:
Humanities Press, 1964).
2. Gergy Lukcs, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (1910; New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
3. It was in that discussion that the movement of existentialism was started
(Erich Fank, Erich Franks Work: An Appreciation by Ludwig Edelstein, in
Wissen, Wollen, Glauben [Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1955], 419).
4. Jean Wahl, Vers le Concret. tudes dhistoire de la philosophie contemporaine
(1932; Paris: Vrin, 2004).
5. Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Problem of Collective
Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber
(NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2007), 33.
7. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995); and Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Government of
Self andOthers II, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmilles, England: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011).
50
th
Existentialism
The Challenge of Existentialism, Then and Now

William L. McBride
purdue university
John Wilds highly successful book The Challenge of Existentialism dates

from 1955;1 it was published by Indiana University Press and based on
his 1953 Mahlon Powell Lectures at Indiana University. Wild was then still
teaching at Harvard, where he had been for many years, but was to remain
there for only five years more, at which point, in 1960, he leftthe first
tenured philosopher to do so in modern times in what was still, after all, a
relatively recent history, the system of graduate philosophy education as we
know it having developed only in the late nineteenth century. It behooves
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us to reflect on the fact that when John Wild left Harvard for Northwestern,
for what were to be just a few years before his subsequent move to Yale, and
organized the first Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
(SPEP) meeting in 1961 with the assistance of his younger protg, James
Edie, the span of time that had passed since those modern beginnings,
years before Wild himself first entered Harvard, was only slightly greater
than the subsequent fifty-year period that we are commemorating here.
In other words, the wisdom of the ancients that we are here attempting to
invoke is not very ancient, after all.
Wilds interest in existentialism or, as he would not have minded my
calling it, existential phenomenology had been stimulated by a postwar trip
to Europe, where he had first encountered the thought especially of Husserl
and Heidegger during a research leave in the mid-1930s. How much had
transpired during the intervening decade or so! Such massive destruction,
for example, of the major German cities, such as Munich, which at that
time and for some years to come still bore some of the scars of war. So it
was fitting that I began to write this essay while seated in a tranquil park in
Munich, looking up from my paper from time to time to stare at a chestnut
tree with massive roots. But I digressor perhaps I am becoming a bit
confused. I myself did not attend the two earliest SPEP meetings, though
I began to participate in SPEP immediately thereafter, but I first saw John
Wild even before SPEP had come into existence, when he delivered the
Presidential Address of the American Philosophical Associations Eastern
Division in December 1960. That meeting, the last of its kind to be held
on a university campus, took place at Yale, where I was a first-year graduate
student, having myself just spent my immediate postcollege year in Europe,
in France, with my principal scholarly focus having been existentialism,
specifically Sartrean existentialism.
By the time of his American Philosophical Association presidency,
John Wild had become a missionary, a zealot, for existentialism to a
degree that took him far beyond what one finds in his book. In the latter,
it is true, he already indicated his strong belief that the analytic trend in
philosophy, the increasing dominance of which at Harvard was to be his
main announced reason for leaving there, was rendering our discipline
increasingly irrelevant, whereas existentialism dealt with real-world issues.
But in The Challenge of Existentialism Wild still suggests that certain aspects
of metaphysical realism, the modernized version of the Western philosophia
perennis to which Wild had subscribed in earlier times, continued to have
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some correctives to offer in areas in which the existentialists had had too
little to say. By the time of SPEPs founding, Wild was no longer given to
offering such conciliatory remarks.
Now, I have begun by focusing on John Wild and his book not so much
for their own sakes, and not even primarily because of the historical link
between Wild and the fiftieth anniversary of SPEP, but because I think
that his enthusiasm for existentialism had a solid basis when he first gave
it expression,2 and it still does now. Of course, existentialism is far from
being a single doctrine. For Wild, it was Kierkegaard, it was Jaspers, it was
Heidegger, it was Marcel, and it was Sartrehardly a homogeneous group!
It included, obviously, religious believers, nonbelievers, and nonbelieving
believers like Heidegger. In fact, what is it, if anything, that these disparate
thinkers have in common? And if we can find it, is this it still viable
today?
One way of approaching an answer to the first of these questions is to
consider the title of a book that was especially influential in beginning to
identify existentialism as a single movement, Jean Wahls Vers le Concret.
(Ihave always found it amusing, by the way, that John Wild and Jean Wahl
had such similar names. I do not know whether they ever met.) So much
of what passed for mainstream contemporary philosophy in prewar France,
with the single noteworthy exception of Bergsons philosophy, was irremediably lost in a world of pure abstraction. In Germany it was not quite so
bad, thanks in part to the influence of Husserl and other tendencies, but
still Heideggers taking leave of Husserl can be seen as in part a rejection
of Husserlian abstractness. In any case, the challenge of existentialism for
all of those usually labeled existentialists certainly involved this quest
for concreteness. A second point in common follows, in a way, from this
first: the focus on our responsibility while at the same time putting into
question and radically rethinking the meaning of ethics. One American
philosopher who saw this very wellan individual who is, with few publications to his credit and having died some years ago already, I believe
largely forgotten todaywas George Schrader. George, who was very active
in SPEP in its early years and played a significant role in bringing John
Wild to Yale, thus reinforcing Yales position as a major center for graduate studies in Continental European philosophy, edited a hefty textbook,
Existential Philosophers: From Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty, that was at the
time one of comparatively few in this area. The chapter in it on Sartre was
one of my earliest publications, and the chapter on Merleau-Ponty was
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written by David Carr. Anyway, George Schraders introduction presented

existentialism as what he called resurgent humanism and emphasized
the role of responsibility in existentialism in a way that I had not considered
before.3 As we consider the ancestors and early movers of SPEP, it would
be a pity if we neglected to recall the name of George Schrader, who was
by training a Kant scholar but who had an excellent instinctive sense of
where existentialisms challenge lay.
I might also mention two of George Schraders first Ph.D. students,
who were good friends but who went their very separate ways. One was
John Silber, who was to achieve great notoriety in both academic politics and politics per se. The other was Richard Grabau, a Jaspers scholar
who played a large role, as head for some years, in shaping the Purdue
Philosophy Department.
Even in the early days of SPEP, there were tensions between the existentialists and the phenomenologists. I vaguely recall, for example, an
annoyed existential challenge being made by John Wild from the audience
to someone who was presenting a careful analysis of some issue or other
in Husserl. What does this have to do with real, living philosophical
issues? he seemed to be asking. This internal tension continued over
the years, until it began to be superseded, as supreme tension, by that
between existentialists and phenomenologists taken together, on the one
hand, and other, newer tendencies in Continental European philosophy
postmodern tendencies, to use the virtually empty descriptor that we nevertheless find it convenient to use as a shorthand. At one point there was
a campaign to change the name of the society itself in light of these new
realities, but it was defeated for two principal reasons, as I see it: First, there
was some nostalgia favoring the retention of the original name because it
was the original name; second, there was no clear consensus in favor of any
single successor name.
Meanwhile, there was an undermining of the existentialist consensus itself from both inside and outside. For example, Wild in his book was
already able to report that Marcel had rejected the existentialist labelin
large measure because it had come to be connected above all with Sartre,
whom Marcel had come to despise. Heidegger was known to have serious
doubts about the label as applied to himself, as he had made clear in his
Letter on Humanism, and indeed one must wonder what of existentialism remains in his later work. Sartre had already begun to move in an
increasingly political direction and to regard existentialism, at least for a
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period of some years, as a mere ideology parasitic on Marxism. (Itwas

on this later Sartre, the author of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, that
Ifocused in my dissertation, of which John Wild was a reader at the end
of his first year at Yale. He was not very happy with Sartres later turn to
Marxismin The Challenge of Existentialism he had presented existentialism as a barrier against Marxism, among other thingsbut he was most
unhappy with my taking Sartres side in the latters quarrel with Camus.)
As for Camus himself, he had always maintained that he was an absurdist
rather than an existentialist, although very few commentators or shapers of
cultural trends ever took that distinction very seriously. In any case, what
I am trying to suggest is what everyone attending the SPEP conference
already senses: that existentialism had entered into a process of dissolution
or dispersion, already by roughly the time of SPEPs founding. And that, as
we know, was fifty years ago.
So, what kind of challenge can it pose today? I think that the question
almost answers itself. First of all, although to speak of the existentialist
outlook as a humanism may be a little problematic for a number of reasons, mostly not Heideggers reasons, existentialism challenges the alleged
death of man. Now, to base the report of the death of man on the discovery that the notion of subjectivity as it was first elaborated by Descartes is
inadequate for comprehending what it means to be human is an academic
ploy with little significance in the real world. Nevertheless, manin the
generic sense, of courseis in real danger of dying, with the root causes
of the danger being many. (Heidegger is to be thanked at least for having been acutely aware of the danger, although it becomes ever clearer,
as the posthumous publication of some new material from his courses
in the mid-1930s has reinforced, that he was often more inclined to feed
the flames than to contribute any saving grace.) Today, in civic life, there
is an atmosphere of increased deadening, of shutting down dialogue, of
nontolerance, of repression in the name of security and in the name of
economy. What existentialist thought of all stripes does in this regard is to
focus attention on the concrete human individual and on his or her future
possibilitiesHeideggers saving grace, Marcels hope, Beauvoirs vision
of liberation, and so oninstead of acquiescing in the mold that they are
attempting to impose.
Second, existentialism makes invaluable contributions to the domain
of ethics, both ethical theory and ethical practice, precisely by admonishing
us that the traditional ways of thinking about ethics, not only in the Western
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260
tradition but in many traditions, are unjustifiable. We have probably all had
occasion to affirm, at some time, that existentialism is of great importance
for ethics, but when challenged, so to speak, to define existentialist ethics,
to say what it is, we are likely to find the task elusive. The reason for this
is precisely because existentialism questions usual assumptions about the
ethical domain. It is radically unconventional, and, as I have already noted,
it throws human actors back on their own responsibility. In a society such
as ours in which, for many, profit maximization is the supreme value, the
existentialist attitude is one of appropriate ridicule of this.
The last of existentialisms contemporary challenges that I would
like to note here is the challenge to reconsider the relationship between
philosophy and the arts, particularly literature. Sartre and Beauvoir tended
to uphold a division between the two in theory while overcoming that same
division in practice. Heidegger, in his later work, increasingly valorized
poetry. At its best, existentialism deprofessionalizes, and it invites openness
and tolerance toward different visions of the world.
So there! To me, although the works that defined existentialism as a
movement must at this point be regarded as classicsas must SPEP and
some of us ourselvesexistentialism remains a living approach to the
world, the radical alternative to the values that they are trying, though
against considerable opposition right now, to impose on us; in fact, existentialism is a way of life. (I take this occasion to note that the theme of the next
World Congress of Philosophy, to be held in Athens in early August 2013,
is Philosophy as Inquiry and Way of Life.) And although I began writing
these brief remarks in Munich, I would have rather been in Philadelphia to
share them with a SPEP audienceas indeed, happily, I was.
notes
1. John Wild, The Challenge of Existentialism (1955; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1979).
2. I would like to call attention to Remembering John Wild, edited by Hwa
Yol Jung, special issue of the Continental Philosophy Review 44, no. 3 (August
2011), based on a panel held at the 2007 SPEP meetings in connection with the
publication of Wilds posthumous papers, which was made available in time for
the fiftieth anniversary meeting.
3. George Alfred Schrader Jr., Existential Philosophy: Resurgent H
umanism,
in Existential Philosophers: Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty, ed. George Alfred
Schrader Jr. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 144.
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existentialism
50
th
261
Existentialism
Existentialism: A Beauvoirean Lineage

Margaret A. Simons
southern illinois university edwardsville
The traditional account of existentialism portrays Simone de Beauvoir

as the philosophical follower of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is credited with
originating the philosophy they shared, including the description of the
Look, and other aspects of relations with the Other found in his book Being
and Nothingness and Beauvoirs metaphysical novel She Came to Stay, both
published in 1943. Beauvoir challenged this traditional account in part in
her autobiographical writings, claiming that her literary works originated
in her own lived experience. But she left unchallenged the traditional
account of Sartre as the philosopher, angrily telling me in a 1972 interview that the only philosophical influence on The Second Sex was Being
and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre.1 Her assertion was obviously false,
given the philosophical differences in the two works; and the line she drew
between literature and philosophy was untenable, failing to account for the
philosophy in her novels.
A new account of Beauvoirs work based on original sources became
possible after Sartres death in 1980 and Beauvoirs in 1986. Their
posthumously published diaries and letters show that Beauvoir completed
a final draft of She Came to Stay that Sartre read during a military leave in
February 1940, before beginning his own work on relations with the Other
in his War Diary.2 Beauvoirs diary from 192627, written while a philosophy student, shows her already working on the problem of theOther years
before meeting Sartre in 1929. I discovered an early formulation of the
problem in her handwritten student diary while working at the Bibliothque
nationale in 1994. In the diary entry dated July 10, 1927, she writes of her
plans to clearly spell out my philosophical ideas and deepen her work on
problems that interested her: The theme is almost always this opposition
of self and other that I felt upon starting to live.3
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262
The Beauvoirean lineage proposed here includes some familiar

guressuch as Husserl (whose work Beauvoir may have encountered as
fi
early as 1927 through her mentor at the Sorbonne, Jean Baruzi), as well
as Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, although her wartime diary and
letters show that she didnt read their works until a decade later.4 Beauvoir
read Heidegger for the first time in July 1939 and Hegels Phenomenology
even later, in July 1940, when she used his idea of History to try and reconcile
herself to the Occupation. Beauvoir first read Kierkegaard in March 1940,
before the Occupation began, but she returned to him in December 1940
as she turned away in disgust from French intellectual collaboration with
the Nazis.
Unfamiliar figures in this lineage include the French philosopher
Henri Bergson, a major focus of Beauvoirs preWorld War II philosophical engagement, and the African American novelist Richard Wright, whose
influence is evident in Beauvoirs postwar texts, including The Second Sex.
This lineage is meant to be neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Research
on Beauvoirs early philosophy is just beginning, and other lineages are
suggested in Shannon Mussett and Bill Wilkersons forthcoming volume
from the State University of New York Press, Beauvoir Engages Philosophy:
Essays on Beauvoirs Dialogue with Western Thought, which includes my
chapter Beauvoir and Bergson: A Question of Influence.
Beauvoirs student diary opens on August 6, 1926, with an entry
revealing the surprising context of her early interest in the problem
of the Otherreturning from a pilgrimage to Lourdes she recounts
her struggle with an ethics of self-abnegation and the absolute gift,
which she describes as moral suicide, proposing instead to achieve an
equilibrium between the duties to self and duties to others. Ten days
later, on August 16, 1926, comes her first reference to Bergsons work
Time and Free Will: On the Immediate Givens of Consciousness, which she
describes as a great intellectual rapture. She writes of being thrilled
by Bergsons analysis of the two aspects of the self and copies several
pages of quotations from his individualist essay including his criticism
of language (the brutal word) for stifling individual consciousness,
his celebration of the bold novelist, and his distinction between the
fundamental self and the parasitic social self that had so thrilled her:
Within the fundamental self is formed a parasitic self that continually
encroaches upon the other. Many live like this, and die without having
known true freedom.5
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existentialism
263
Beauvoirs early engagement with Bergsons philosophy is featured

in her short story cycle When Things of the Spirit Come First (written from
1935 to 1937), which she describes as a satire on the intellectual passions
of her youth. One of Beauvoirs main protagonists, Chantal, sees herself
as exemplifying Bergsons turn to immediate experience, which, ironically,
has become an instrument of self-deception: Today ... I understood the
truth of certain pages of Bergson that have long been close to my heart: dissecting our fleeting impressions, shutting them up in words, and turning
them into thoughts very often means brutally destroying the impalpable
shimmer that gives them all their value. Yes: what we must do is attune
our consciousness to the changing flow of life. In an implicit criticism
of Bergsons subjectivist methodology, a confrontation with the Other is
required to expose Chantals hypocrisy and bad faith. But Spirit concludes
with a young heroines Bergsonean rejection of ready-made values and
discovery of self in the turn to immediate experience: All I have wished to
do was to show how I was brought to try to look things straight in the face,
without accepting oracles or ready-made values.6
In She Came to Stay, written from 1937 to 1941, Beauvoir launches
a more concerted attack on Bergsons philosophy, using his subjectivist
methodology to challenge subjectivist metaphysics by describing a subjective experience of the existence of other minds. Franoise, the novels
protagonist, begins as a metaphysical solipsist, denying the existence of
consciousnesses separate from her own: I feel that things which do not
exist for me, simply do not exist at all; to me their thoughts are exactly
like their words and their faces; objects in my own world. In a merged
relationship with her lover, Pierre, she is also, in Bergsons terms, a
utilitarian thinker trapped by language and social convention: Nothing
that happened was completely real until she had told Pierre about it....
[S]he no longer knew solitude, but she had rid herself of that swarming
confusion. Every moment of her life that she entrusted to [Pierre] was
given back to her clear, polished, completed, and they became moments of
their shared life.7 Franoises solipsism is threatened by her attraction to a
young woman, Xavire, a sensualist and dreamer who also attracts Pierre.
Failing at her attempts to control Xavire and fearing a separation from
Pierre, Franoise gradually abdicates herself in favor of the young woman,
emulating Xavires bodily attunement and impulsive behavior.
The crisis comes in a scene at a nightclub where Franoise first cringes
at the sight of Xavire burning her hand with a cigarette and then recoils at
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264
the sight of herself as an object of Xavires hostile, jealous gaze: Facing

Franoise ... an alien consciousness was rising. It was like death, a total
negation, an eternal absence, and yet, by a staggering contradiction, this
abyss of nothingness could make itself ... exist for itself with plenitude....
Franoise ... was herself dissolved in this void, the infinity of which no
word, no image could encompass. Franoise later explains her experience
to Pierre, making clear her reliance on subjective, embodied experience:
Idiscovered she has a consciousness like mine. Has it ever happened to
you to feel anothers consciousness as something within? ... Its intolerable, you know. Beauvoir makes explicit her philosophical challenge to
metaphysical solipsism: Everyone experiences his own consciousness
as an absolute. How can several absolutes be compatible? The problem
is as great a mystery as birth or death, in fact its such a problem that
philosophers break their heads over it. And she emphasizes a Bergsonean
turn to immediate experience: For me, an idea is not theoretical.... It is
experienced [sprouve], or, if it remains theoretical, it doesnt count.8
In the novels melodramatic conclusion, Franoise finds herself
once again the object of Xavires Look, but this time the experience is
accompanied by unbearable guilt and shame: With horror Franoise saw
the woman Xavire was confronting with blazing eyes, this woman was
herself. The shame drives Franoise to murder: She was at the mercy of
this voracious consciousness that had been waiting in the shadow for the
moment to swallow her up. Jealous, traitorous, guilty. She could not defend
herself with timid words and furtive deeds. Xavire existed; the betrayal
existed. My guilty face exists in the flesh. It will exist no longer... . Either she
or I. It shall be I.9
Who originated this philosophical exploration of the Look of the
OtherSartre or Beauvoir? Thats the question that Jessica Benjamin asked
Simone de Beauvoir in our 1979 interview: So when you wrote in She
Came to Stay that Franoise says that what really upsets her about Xavire
is the fact that she has to confront in her another consciousness. That is
not an idea that particularly came because Sartre was thinking about that,
or it was something that you were also thinking about? Beauvoirs answer
was so shocking I had to ask them to repeat it: SdB: It was I who thought
about that! It was absolutely not Sartre! JB: So that is an idea which seems
to me appears later in his work. SdB: Ah! Maybe! ... (Laughter) In any case
this problem was my problem. This problem of the consciousness of the
Other, this was my problem.10
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existentialism
265
Hazel Barnes attempted to defend the traditional account of Sartre

originating their philosophical work on the Other in a 1998 Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy program session, pointing
to an altogether definitive passage on page 255 of his War Diary, where
Sartre describes in detail the first project of love as presented later in Being
and Nothingness.11 But unfortunately for Barness argument, that passage
dates from February 27, 1940, ten days after Sartres return from leave on
February 17, when he began working with the ideas from Beauvoirs novel,
writing in his War Diary that Beauvoir has taught me something new: in
her novel.12
Beauvoirs Wartime Diary chronicles the emergence of her postwar
philosophy of communication and political engagement. In January 1941,
during the first year of the Nazi Occupation, cut off from Sartre, who
was in a prison camp, and realizing that individual freedom requires a
free society, Beauvoir abandons both the moral solipsism of She Came to
Stay and the Bergsonean critique of language. In her postwar philosophy,
Beauvoir draws upon the work of the African American writer Richard
Wright, whose influence on French existentialism is extensive and largely
unrecognized.
The first two issues of Les temps modernes include a serialization of one
of Wrights stories. His entire autobiography, Black Boy, was also serialized in Les temps modernes. In America Day by Day, a chronicle of her 1947
lecture tour of the States, Beauvoir describes Wright as her intellectual
guide to Americaincluding the oppressive system of racial segregation.
Fortunately America Day by Day is now available in a recent retranslation
that restores references to Wright and quotes on racism from Gunnar
Myrdals An American Dilemma deleted from the original 1953 edition.
Wright employed a subjectivist methodology, influenced by William
James, to describe the psychological experience of black people under
racial oppression, descriptions that provided Beauvoir with a model for
describing womens oppression in The Second Sex, also, finally, available
in a new English translation. Beauvoir refers to Black Boy in the chapter
on the independent woman in claiming that women, like black men,
have to struggle merely to raise themselves to the level where white
men begin. Her reference, in the childhood chapter, to the cursed alterity experienced by Bigger Thomas in Wrights Native Son suggests the
indirect influence (via Wright) of W. E. B. DuBoiss concept of double
consciousness on Beauvoirs thesis of woman as the Other.13
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266
That Beauvoir continued to draw upon Wright and Bergson throughout

her life is evident in the several volumes of the Beauvoir Series from the
University of Illinois Press. The forthcoming volume, Political Writings, for
example, demonstrates her continuing efforts to expose oppression, while
her continuing interest in a Bergsonean description of the experience of
time is evident in her story Misunderstanding in Moscow, in the newly
published fourth volume of the series, The Useless Mouths and Other
Literary Writings.
notes
I would like to express my appreciation to the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy Executive Committee for inviting me to join the session
Existentialism: Then and Now, to Bryan Lueck for suggesting the theme of
existentialisms lineages, and to Sheryl Lauth at Southern Illinois University
Edwardsvilles Instructional Technology Services for converting the audiocassette
of the 1979 interview with Simone de Beauvoir to a digital format and showing
me how to prepare the PowerPoint slides that accompanied my presentation.
1. Quoted in Margaret A. Simons, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism,
Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield,
1999), x.
2. See Edward Fullbrook, She Came to Stay and Being and Nothingness, Hypatia
14, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 5069; reprinted in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir:
Critical Essays, ed. Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006), 4264.
3. Simone de Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student, vol. 1: 192627, ed. B. Klaw,
S. Le Bon de Beauvoir, M. Simons, and M. Timmermann; trans. Barbara Klaw
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 279.
4. For more on Baruzi and Husserl, see my Beauvoirs Early Philosophy:
192627, in Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student, 3940; and for Beauvoirs
wartime philosophy and her readings of Hegel, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard,
see my Introduction, in Simone de Beauvoir, Wartime Diary, ed. Margaret A.
Simons and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir; trans. Anne Deing Cordero (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2009), 135.
5. Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student, 5455, 66, 5860.
6. Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First. Five Early Tales,
trans. Patrick OBrian (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 55, 212.
7. Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger
Senhouse (New York: Norton, 1954), 1617, 26; my revised translation.
8. Ibid., 291, 295, 301.
9. Ibid., 4012.
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267
10. Margaret A. Simons and Jessica Benjamin, Beauvoir Interview (1979), in

Simons, Beauvoir and The Second Sex, 10.
11. Hazel Barnes, Response to Margaret Simons, Philosophy Today 42 (SPEP
Supplement, 1998): 3233.
12. Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre. November 1939March
1940, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 255, 197.
13. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Knopf, 2010), 736, 311.
18/06/12 4:40 PM

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Existentialism

anniversary sessions: then and now

Toward the Concrete

While I was a graduate student at Columbia during the interesting years

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 247

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 248

Existential Philosophy Then

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 249

Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism (1949); and

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 250

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), In Praise of

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 251

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 252

Existentialist Philosophy Now?

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 253

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 254

anniversary sessions: then and now

The Challenge of Existentialism, Then and Now

John Wilds highly successful book The Challenge of Existentialism dates

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 255

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 256

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 257

written by David Carr. Anyway, George Schraders introduction presented

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 258

period of some years, as a mere ideology parasitic on Marxism. (Itwas

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 259

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 260

anniversary sessions: then and now

Existentialism: A Beauvoirean Lineage

The traditional account of existentialism portrays Simone de Beauvoir

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 261

The Beauvoirean lineage proposed here includes some familiar

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 262

Beauvoirs early engagement with Bergsons philosophy is featured

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 263

the sight of herself as an object of Xavires hostile, jealous gaze: Facing

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 264

Hazel Barnes attempted to defend the traditional account of Sartre

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 265

That Beauvoir continued to draw upon Wright and Bergson throughout

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 266

10. Margaret A. Simons and Jessica Benjamin, Beauvoir Interview (1979), in

JSP 26.2_17_Existentialism.indd 267

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