Existentialism

The term 'existentialism' was officially coined by Gabriel Marcel in 1943 and is often reserved
for the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who used it to refer to their own
philosophies in the mid-1940s. But it is more often used as a general name for a number of
thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who made the concrete individual central to
their thought. Existentialism in this broader sense arose as a backlash against philosophical and
scientific systems that emphasize the standpoint of theoretical detachment and treat all
particulars, including humans, as members of a genus or instances of universal laws. It claims
that our own existence as unique individuals in concrete situations cannot be grasped adequately
in such theories, and that systems of this sort conceal from us the highly personal task of trying
to achieve self- fulfilment and meaning in our lives. Existentialists therefore start out with a
detailed description of the self as an 'existing individual', understood as an agent involved in a
specific social and historical context. One of their chief aims is to understand how the individual
can achieve the richest, most authentic, and fulfilling life in the modern world.

Existentialists hold widely differing views about human existence, but there are a number of
recurring themes in their writings. First, existentialists generally hold that humans have no pre-
given purpose or essence laid out for them by God or by nature; it is up to each one of us to
decide who and what we are through our own actions. This is the point of Sartre's definition
of existentialism as the view that, for humans, 'existence precedes essence'. What this means is
that we first simply exist - find ourselves thrown into a world that is not of our own choosing -
and it is then up to each of us to define our own identity or essential characteristics in the course
of what we do in living out our lives. Thus, our essence (our set of defining traits) is chosen or
made, not given.

Second, existentialists hold that people decide their own fates and are responsible for what they
make of their lives. Humans have free will in the sense that, no matter what social and biological
factors influence their decisions, they can reflect on those conditions, decide what they mean,
and then make their own choices as to how to handle those factors in acting in the world.
Because we are self-creating or self-fashioning beings in this sense, we have full responsibility
for what we make of our lives.

Third, existentialists generally maintain that the truths of the human situation are disclosed not
by means of detached cognition or rational reflection but through powerful emotional
experiences like ‘anxiety’, ‘nausea’, ‘guilt’, and the feeling of ‘absurdity’. Moods, in this sense,
not only reveal what matters and is at stake in our lives; they also have the power to pull us out
of our ordinary tendency to conform to the stabilizing norms of the ‘herd’ and expose us to the
fact that our existence is fundamentally precarious and finite.

Fourth, existentialists are concerned with the idea ‘being true’ to oneself and identifying the most
authentic and fulfilling way of life possible for individuals. Because of our conformist
tendencies, we usually feel we are living well if we do what 'one' does in familiar social
situations. In this respect, our lives are said to be 'inauthentic' or not really our own. To become
authentic, according to this view, an individual must take over their own existence with a sense
of clarity and intensity. Such a transformation is often made possible by emotional experiences
such as anxiety or existential guilt. When we face up to what is revealed in such experiences,
existentialists claim, we will have a clearer grasp of what is at stake in life, and we will be able to
become more committed and integrated individuals.

Finally, although they are often criticized for promoting a kind of moral nihilism, existentialists
from Kierkegaard onward have been concerned with fundamental moral questions such as ‘What
should I do?’ and ‘How should I live?’ Although they reject the viability of traditional normative
ethics that offer universal prescriptions for how we ‘ought’ to act, by emphasizing the underlying
freedom of the human situation, existentialists make it clear that the individual alone is
responsible for their choices and actions in the world. This explains why Beauvoir can say, ‘to
will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision’ (1947/1948, 24). In
this sense, there is a strong connection between ethics and authenticity for the existentialists,
insofar as affirming one’s own freedom and owning up to the fact that our actions have
consequences and affect the lives of others is central to the prospect of ‘being true’ to oneself.

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1 Historical development
Although early thinkers such as Augustine, Montaigne, Shakespeare and Pascal have been called
existentialists, the term should be reserved for a loosely connected group of thinkers in recent
times who were responding to certain views that became widespread in the nineteenth century.
These views include, first, the scientific picture of reality as a meaningless, value-free collection
of material objects in causal interactions, and second, the modern sense of society as an artificial
construct that is inevitably in conflict with the aspirations of the individual. German Idealism had
attempted to counteract the implications of these new ideas, but it had largely collapsed by the
1840s, and the result was a growing feeling that the individual is ultimately alone and
unsupported in a cold and meaningless universe (see German idealism).

Existentialism appeared in the nineteenth century alongside romanticism, but it was different
from romanticism in important respects. For one thing, where romanticism tried to evoke a sense
of the individual's participation in the larger context of nature, the first great existentialist,
Søren Kierkegaard , held that humans are at the most basic level solitary, 'existing individuals'
with no real connections to anything in this world. Instead of suggesting that we are at home in
the world, Kierkegaard tried to intensify the individual's feeling of anxiety and despair in order
to bring about a 'leap of faith' that would bring the person into a defining relationship to the God-
man (Christ).

The next figure usually included in the pantheon of existentialists, Friedrich Nietzsche, began
from the assumption that the development of science and rational thinking in Western history has
led to the result that people have lost the ability to believe in moral absolutes, that is, an enduring
and transcendent basis for our values and beliefs. When Nietzsche said that 'God is dead', he
meant that all the things people previously thought of as absolutes - the Cosmic Order, Platonic
Forms, Divine Will, Reason, History - have been shown to be human constructions, with no
ultimate authority in telling us how to live our lives. In the face of the growing 'nihilism' that
results from the death of God, Nietzsche tried to formulate a vision of a healthy form of life
people can achieve once they have given up all belief in absolutes (see Nihilism).
The translation of Kierkegaard's works and the discovery of Nietzsche's writings had an immense
impact on German thought after the First World War. The psychiatrist and philosopher,
Karl Jaspers, drew on these two figures to develop what he called a 'philosophy of existence'
(Existenzphilosophie). Martin Heidegger, influenced by Kierkegaard as well as by the movement
called 'life-philosophy' (then associated with the names of Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey and
Henri Bergson), began his major work, Being and Time (1927), with an ‘analytic of Dasein’ or
'existential analytic' aimed at describing life from the standpoint of concrete, everyday being-in-
the- world (see Lebensphilosophie ). Heidegger's thought was also influenced by Edmund
Husserl's phenomenology, an approach to philosophy that emphasizes close description of our
ordinary experience as it is prior to reflection and theorizing (see Phenomenological movement ).

Working independently in France, Gabriel Marcel was building on Bergson's thought to develop
an alternative to the dominant idealist philosophy taught in French universities. Basing his
reflections on his own experience of life, Marcel claimed that a human being must be understood
as an embodied existence already bound up with a concrete situation. Because the body and the
situation can never be completely comprehended by the intellect, Marcel sees them as part of
what he calls the 'mystery'. The body, understood this way, is not something I ‘have’ that is
external to me, as the Cartesian tradition might suggest. It is, rather, who I ‘am’; ‘I am my body’.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty took over Marcel's notion of embodied being-in-a-situation as a basis for
his own existential phenomenology. Jean-Paul Sartre also drew on Marcel's thought, but he was
especially influenced by the work of Husserl and Heidegger. Although the term 'existentialism'
was first used by critics of Sartre it quickly came to be accepted in the 1940s by Sartre and
Beauvoir as they replied to their critics. Merleau-Ponty and Albert Camus were initially
associated with the movement called existentialism during its heyday after the Second World
War, but both eventually rejected the label as they came to distance themselves from Sartre due
to political differences.

There have been important developments outside Germany and France as well. The Spanish
philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, for example, drew on the ideas of Kierkegaard to address the
situation of ‘the man who is born, suffers, and dies’ (1912/1954, 1), and his compatriot
José Ortega y Gasset, influenced by Dilthey's ‘life-philosophy’, developed a number of ideas that
closely paralleled those of Sartre, Heidegger, and other existentialist thinkers. The novels and
short stories of the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, were influential not only for Russian
existentialists like Nikolai Berdiaev, but for Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus as well.
These literary influences continued to find expression in the writings of figures such as Rainer
Maria Rilke, Herman Hesse, and Franz Kafka, and more recently in the novels of Philip Roth,
Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and Milan Kundera as well as the plays of Samuel Beckett and Arthur
Miller. Existentialism has also had a wide and profound impact on other fields, influencing, for
instance, the films of John-Luc Godard, Ingmar Berman, and Michelangelo Antonioni, and the
artwork of Edvard Munch, Alberto Giacometti, and Jackson Pollack. The movement continues to
have an enormous influence on contemporary theology with the religious existentialism of
Protestant figures such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann, Jewish intellectuals
such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, and the Catholic philosophy of Marcel
(see Existentialist theology ). And existential psychoanalysis (especially in the work of
Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Viktor Frankl, and Rollo May) continues to be of interest in
psychotherapy. Given these wide-ranging influences, it is a mistake to view existentialism as a
moribund or outdated movement. Furthermore, it continues to play a vital role in contemporary
philosophy and social theory.

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2 The human condition

Existentialists start out from the assumption that it is no longer possible to believe that there is
some transcendent justification or underlying ground for our existence. If ‘God is dead’, then we
find ourselves 'abandoned', 'forlorn', and 'thrown' into a world, with no pregiven direction or
legitimation. Though we seek some overarching meaning and purpose for our lives, we have to
face the fact that there is no 'proper function of humans' or 'plan in God's mind' that tells us the
right way to be human.

This picture of our predicament leads to a particular view of human existence that is accepted by
many existentialists. In contrast to traditional theories, which think of a human as a thing or
object of some sort (whether a mind or a body or some combination of the two), existentialists
characterize human existence as involving a deep tension or conflict between two different
aspects of our being. On the one hand, we are organisms among other living beings, creatures
with specific needs and drives, who operate at the level of sensation and desire in dealing with
the present. At this level, we are not much different from other animals. On the other hand, there
is a crucial respect in which we differ from other organisms. One way to describe this difference
is to say that, because we are capable of self-awareness, we are able to reflect on our own desires
and evaluate ourselves in terms of some larger vision of what our lives are adding up to. In this
sense we surpass or transcend our own being as mere things. What is characteristic of our being
as humans is that we care about the kinds of beings we are, and we are therefore able to take a
stand on our basic desires. According to the existentialists, humans are unique among entities in
that we form second-order desires about our first-order desires, and we therefore have aspirations
that go beyond the immediacy of our sensual lives.

Heidegger and Sartre try to capture this reflexive dimension of human existence by saying that
what is unique about humans is that our own being is 'in question' or 'at issue' for us. What kind
of person I am matters to me, and because I am concerned about what I am and will be, I take
some concrete stand on my life by assuming roles and developing a specific character through
my actions. But this means that my existence is characterized by a fundamental tension or clash
between my immediate sensations and desires on the one hand, and my long-range aims and
projects on the other. As Sartre puts it, a 'rift' or a 'gap' - a 'nothingness' - is introduced into the
fullness of being in the universe by human existence. Because consciousness makes us more than
what we are as creatures with immediate sensations and desires, Sartre says that human reality 'is
not what it is and is what it is not' (1943/1956, 107).

The conception of human existence as a tension also appears in Kierkegaard's description of the
self. For Kierkegaard, humans are both finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, determined and
free. What defines our identity as selves is the concrete way we relate ourselves to this tension.
In a similar way, Nietzsche holds that we are both ‘creatures and creators’, and we have to
embrace both these dimensions of ourselves in order to be fully human. And Ortega y Gasset
describes the human being as ‘a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half
transcending it’ (1939/1941a, 111, see Ortega Y Gasset, J. ). Heidegger and Sartre refer to the
two aspects of the self as 'facticity' (understood as the limitations of our givenness such as our
physiology and the sociohistorical situation we have been thrown into) and 'transcendence' (our
ability to surpass our givenness through the interpretations and meanings we give to it). In their
view, life is a continuous tension between these elements, a tension resolved only in death.
Finally, Jaspers seems to have a similar conception of humans in mind when he points out the
polarity between our being as an empirical consciousness-as-such and our desire to grasp the
universal and realize our freedom as Existenz.

If we regard the self as a tension or struggle, it is natural to think of human existence not as a
thing or object of some sort, but as an unfolding event or happening - the story of how the
tension is dealt with. What defines my existence, according to this view, is not some set of
properties that remain the same through time, but, in Kierkegaard’s words, a 'process of
becoming' (1846/1941, 176) through which I carry out the struggle to resolve the tension that
defines my condition in the world. As an ongoing happening, I am what I make of myself
throughout the course of my life as a whole. As Ortega writes, a human 'does not have a nature;
what he has is… history’ (1935/1941b, 217,). What defines my existence as an individual, then,
is the ongoing story of what I choose to do and accomplish throughout my life.

To think of a human as an unfolding story suggests that human existence has a specific sort of
temporal structure. We are not like rocks or trees that continue to exist through an endless
sequence of 'nows'. Instead, human temporality has a kind of cumulativeness and future-
directedness that is different from the enduring presence of physical things. First, our existence is
directed toward the future to the extent that we are striving to realize something for our
lives. Heidegger calls this element of 'futurity' our 'being-towards-death,' understood as a
movement toward realizing our own being by achieving certain things throughout our active
lives. Second, the past shows up for us as something retained and carried forward for the
purposes of our future. Existence, understood this way, is a kind of ‘thrown projection’
(Heidegger 1927/1962) whereby, depending on our projects at any given time, our past actions
show up for us as assets or as liabilities in relation to what we are doing. Finally, our present
appears as a point of intersection between our future projects and our past accomplishments.
Because we are time-binding beings whose lives always reach out into the future and hold on to
the past, we can never achieve the kind of direct presence of self to self that Descartes thought he
had found in the cogito ('I think').

To say that human temporality is cumulative is to say that everything we do is contributing to

creating our 'being' as a totality. In this sense, we are what we do in living out our lives: we
define our own identity through the choices we make in dealing with the world. Because there is
no fixed essential nature that we have in advance, our 'essence' as individuals is defined and
realized through our concrete existence in the world. Whatever capacities and traits I am born
with, it is up to me to take them over and make something of them in what I do. Thus, whether I
am aware of it or not, I am creating my own identity with my actions.

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3 Being-in-the-world
Existentialists are deeply suspicious of the detached, abstract theorizing about humans found in
traditional philosophy and the sciences. In their view, the concern with subsuming all particulars
under general concepts and building systems tends to conceal crucial features of our lives as
individuals. For this reason, existentialists generally start out from a description of ourselves as
agents in everyday contexts, prior to reflection and theorizing. These descriptions reveal that it is
part of our 'facticity' that we are generally caught up in the midst of things, involved with others
in trying to accomplish specific goals, and affected by moods and commitments that influence
our perceptions and thoughts. Furthermore, we are embodied beings who encounter the world
only from the standpoint of a particular bodily orientation that gives us a framework or set on
things. We are, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘first of all surrounded by [our] body, involved in the
world, and situated here and now’ (1945/1962, 37), and this theme of situated embodiment
became central to the work of Sartre and Beauvoir as well as more contemporary figures such as
Franz Fanon and Iris Marion Young. The existentialists go on to suggest we are bound up with
contexts of equipment in practical situations in our efforts to accomplish certain tasks. Finally, as
social beings, we always find ourselves embedded in a particular cultural and historical milieu
that conditions our outlook and determines our basic orientation toward the world. To say that
we are 'factical' beings, then, is to say that we are always 'being-in-a-situation', where our being
as selves is inseparable from a shared, meaningful life-world.

If we are always embedded in a situation, then all inquiry must start out from an 'insider's
perspective' on things, that is, from a description of the world as it appears to us - to beings who
are participants in our forms of life, with our unique bodily set, feelings and modes of
perception. We have no choice but to begin from where we stand in the thick of our actual lives,
with our local attachments and particular cares and concerns. But this means that there is no way
to achieve a detached 'God's-eye view' on ourselves and our world, a view philosophers have
sought ever since Plato. Existentialists are critical of the philosophical ideal of achieving a totally
disinterested and disengaged 'view from nowhere' that will provide us with completely objective
knowledge. The attempt to step back from our ordinary concerns in order to achieve a totally
detached and dispassionate standpoint - the stance Marcel calls 'desertion' and Merleau-
Ponty calls 'high-altitude thinking' - will always give us a distorted view of the world, because it
bleaches out our normal sense of the significance and worth of the things we encounter around
us. In order to be able to gain an insight into the way reality presents itself to us at the most basic
level, then, we need to start from a description of what Heidegger calls our 'average
everydayness', our ordinary, familiar ways of being absorbed in practical affairs.

The idea that our being-in-a-situation or being-in-the-world is fundamental and inescapable gives
the existentialists a way of criticizing the idea, central to philosophy since Descartes, that we are
at the most basic level minds receiving sensory inputs and processing information. Sartre, for
example, rejects the idea that the self can be thought of as a 'thinking substance' or self-
encapsulated 'field of consciousness' distinct from the world. In my pre-reflective
activities, Sartre says, I encounter myself not as a bundle of beliefs and desires in a mental
container, but as being 'out there' with the things I am concerned about. When I am chasing a
bus, I encounter my self as 'running-toward-the-bus'. My being is found not in my head, but with
the bus. Sartre thinks that this follows from Husserl's view that consciousness is always
'intentional,' always directed towards entities in the world (see Intentionality ). If Husserl is right,
according to Sartre, then the 'I' is not an object, not a 'something', but is instead sheer intentional
activity directed towards things in the world. The totality of my intentional acts defines me; there
is no residue of 'substantial thinghood' distinct from my acts.
The existentialist conception of our irreducible being-in-a-situation calls into question some of
the dualisms that have dominated so much of Western thought. First, existentialists deny the
romantic distinction between an outer self - what we do in the world - and an inner, 'true' self that
embodies our genuine nature. If we just are what we do, as existentialists contend, then there is
no basis for positing a substantive 'real me' distinct from the parts I play and the things I do.
Second, the account of the primacy of being-in-the-world tends to undermine the traditional
subject-object model of our epistemological situation. Existentialists suggest that the assumption
that humans are, at the most basic level, subjects of experience trying to formulate beliefs about
objects on the basis of their inner representations, distorts our situation. If it is true that we are
initially and most basically already out there involved with things in the world, then there must
be something wrong with traditional epistemological puzzles about how a knowing subject can
'transcend' its veil of ideas to gain knowledge of objects in the external world. This is why, in
rejecting this dualistic picture, Merleau-Ponty can say ‘the subject that I am, when taken
concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world’ (1945/1962, 408). Finally, the
existentialist view of our basic situation as always bound up with a practical life-world seems to
raise questions about the traditional fact-value distinction. Existentialists hold that we always
encounter the everyday life-world as a context of equipment bound up with our aims as agents in
the world. If the things we encounter are initially and most basically functional entities tied up
with our purposive activities, however, then it is an illusion to think that what is given 'at first' is
a collection of brute objects we subsequently invest with subjective values. In our everyday lives,
fact and value are inseparable.

In general, existentialists hold that traditional dualisms arise only when we try to adopt a
detached theoretical stance towards things. But since such a stance is derivative from and
parasitic on a more basic way of being in which we are inseparably bound up with things in
practical contexts, it cannot be regarded as providing us with a privileged insight into the way
things really are.

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4 Freedom and responsibility

As being-in-the-world, we are already engaged in a shared life-world that gives us a prior sense
of what is possible, and we find ourselves with choices in our past that carry weight in
determining how we can act in the future. This is our 'facticity', and it makes up what is already
'given' in our lives. However, existentialists regard facticity as only one aspect of human
existence, for they hold that humans always have the ability to surpass or transcend their given
situation by taking a stand on their own lives. As 'transcendence' we are always taking over our
situations and making something of them through our choices. This ability to transcend our
facticity means that we have free will. Our choices are free in the sense that (1) no outside
factors can fundamentally determine our will, (2) in any particular case we could have acted
otherwise than we did, and (3) we are therefore responsible for our choices in a way that justifies
moral praise and blame (see Free will ). (Nietzsche is inclined to reject the third sense because of
its presupposition of irreducibly moral terms, but in other respects he seems to be committed to
believing in human freedom.)
The existentialist belief in human freedom is based on a phenomenological description of our
everyday lives. In confronting situations where I must make a choice, I find myself facing an
open range of possible courses of action where nothing compels me to choose one course of
action over the others. Even in cases where I am not aware of making choices, a moment's
reflection shows that I am in fact deciding my own life. Suppose that I show up for work
faithfully each day, and I believe that I am compelled to do this because I need to make money to
support my family. Does this mean that I am forced to do what I do? An existentialist
like Sartre would say that it is self-deception to think I am compelled to be a conscientious
worker, for I could always walk away from it all and join a monastery or turn to a life of crime.
If I am choosing to let considerations of duty or money be deciding factors for me in this way,
then this is my choice. What this suggests is that even in my habitual and seemingly 'automatic'
actions I am actually assuming a particular identity for myself through my own free choices, and
am therefore responsible for what I do.

Sartre tries to capture this idea by saying that humans are 'condemned to be free'. Because our
being is 'in question' for us, we are always taking it over and giving it some concrete shape
through our actions. And this means that, whether we are aware of it or not, in continuing to act
in familiar ways we are constantly renewing our decisions at every moment, for we could always
change our ways of living through some radical self-transformation. Moreover, since all criteria
or standards for evaluating our actions are also freely chosen, in our actions we are also deciding
what sorts of reasons are going to guide our actions. With no higher tribunal for evaluating
reasons for acting, we are entirely responsible for what we do: as Sartre says, there are ‘no values
or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct… We are alone with no excuses’
(1946/2001, 296).

Existentialists generally hold that we are not only responsible for the direction our own lives
take, but also for the way the world around us appears. This idea has its roots in Kant's view that
the reality we experience is partly shaped by the constituting activity of our own minds, though
existentialists differ from Kant in holding that our construction of reality depends on our own
choices (see Kant, I. §5 ). Kierkegaard, for example, contends that one's sense of reality is
determined by the 'sphere of existence' in which one lives, so that the person who lives the life of
a pleasure-loving aesthete will experience a world that is quite different from that of the duty-
bound follower of the ethical. Similarly, Nietzsche holds that reality is accessible to us only
through some 'perspective' or other, that there is no way to get in touch with reality as it is in
itself, independent of any point of view or framework of interpretation.

Sartre works out an especially strong version of this Kantian outlook by developing the theory of
constitution in Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl held that the world we experience is
constituted through the meaning-giving activity of consciousness. Sartre takes this account of
constitution to mean that, because I shape the world around me through my meaning-giving
activity, I am ultimately responsible for the way the world presents itself to me in my experience.
Thus if I have had some painful experiences as a child, it is up to me to decide what these mean
to me. I can use them as an excuse for going through life feeling cheated, or regard them as
challenges that will make me stronger. Sartre's point is not that there are no constraints on the
ways I interpret my situation, but that constraints and obstacles gain their meaning from me, and
since there are an indefinite number of possible meanings any situation can have, there is no way
to identify any supposedly 'hard' facts that could be said to compel me to see things one way
rather than another. But this means, according to Sartre, that in choosing my interpretation of
myself, I simultaneously choose the world. It is our own freely chosen projects that determine
how reality is to be carved up and how things are to count. Sartre even goes so far as to say that,
if a war breaks out around me, then I am responsible for that war, because it is up to me to decide
what the war is going to mean to me in my life.

Other existentialists have tried to formulate a more tempered conception of

freedom. Kierkegaard argues that, because being human involves both necessity and possibility,
the extreme sort of 'anything-goes' freedom (such as that later envisaged by Sartre) would lead to
the 'despair of lack of necessity'. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty work towards a notion of
'situated freedom' according to which choice is always embedded in and dependent upon the
meaningful choices disclosed by a specific social and historical situation. Beauvoir tries to show
how institutions and social practices can cut off the choices open to women and oppressed
groups. Finally, Nietzsche calls attention to the way biological and historical factors operate
'behind our backs,' influencing our decisions without our awareness. But even when such
limitations are recognized, the belief that we can rise above our situations to be 'creators' remains
fundamental to existentialist thought.

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5 Everyday existence, anxiety and guilt

Though existentialists agree that people are free to choose their own fates, they also hold that
most people are quite unaware of their freedom. This obliviousness results not from ignorance or
oversight, but from the fact that we usually try to avoid facing up to our responsibility for our
lives. For the most part we are 'fleeing' from ourselves, throwing ourselves into mundane
concerns and drifting into standardized public ways of acting. Existentialists are generally quite
critical of everyday social existence. As they see it, there is a strong temptation to let ourselves
get swallowed up by the 'public' (Kierkegaard) the 'they' (Heidegger), the 'herd' (Nietzsche) or
the 'masses' (Ortega y Gasset). We try to do what 'one does' in familiar situations, and we assume
that our lives are justified so long as we are following the norms and conventions laid out in our
social context. In throwing ourselves into the kinds of workaday busy-ness characteristic of
contemporary society, we become more and more effective at finding means to achieving
socially accepted ends, but at the same time we lose the ability to understand what is at stake in
existing. Life then becomes a disjointed series of episodes with no real coherence or direction,
and we end up dispersed and distracted, lacking any basis for meaningful action.

Existentialists give similar accounts of how social existence undermines our ability to realize
ourselves as individuals. Kierkegaard describes the way that being a well-adjusted member of
'the public' levels everything down to the lowest common denominator, with the result that
qualitative distinctions between things are flattened and nothing can really count or matter to
people anymore. Similarly, Nietzsche describes the way that our being as 'herd' animals
domesticates us and deadens our creativity, and Heidegger points out the 'tranquilization' and
'alienation from ourselves' that results from our absorption in the familiar social
world. Sartre presents an especially harsh picture of social relations. Since, in his view, people
can only see each other as things or objects and not as free beings, ‘the Look’ of the Other
always objectifies me and pressures me into thinking I am just a brute thing. As each individual
struggles to affirm their being as a free 'transcendence' against the objectifying look of others, the
result is inevitable conflict: in the words of a character in Sartre's play Huis clos (No Exit), 'Hell
is other people'.

But many existentialists also see a positive side to social life. Though Heidegger criticizes the
temptation to self-loss in our participation in the 'they', he also holds that all our possible ways of
interpreting ourselves ultimately come from the social context in which we find ourselves. For
this reason, becoming authentic is not a matter of escaping society, but of embracing our social
existence in the right way. Marcel's attitude toward social existence shows how different he is
from Sartre. He criticizes the 'technocratic attitude' of mass society not because it leads to
conformism, but because it breeds an 'atomic individualism' that robs us of our deep sense of
connection and obligation to others. And Jaspers and Buber both emphasize the importance of 'I-
Thou' relations in realizing a full and meaningful life.

Although existentialists differ in their assessment of social existence, they agree in thinking that
our ordinary, day-to-day existence is shot through with concealment and self-deception. What
can free us from this distorted sense of things is not rational reflection, but a profound affective
experience. This emphasis on the role of emotions or moods in giving us access to the truth about
ourselves is one of the most distinctive features of existentialist
thought. Kierkegaard and Heidegger, for example, focus on the disclosive role of ‘anxiety’ in
leading us to confront the fact that we exist as finite beings who must decide the content of our
own lives. Jaspers' concept of 'limit-situations' refers to situations in which our ordinary ways of
handling our lives 'founder' as we encounter certain inescapable 'antinomies' of life. For Sartre,
the feeling of ‘nausea’ shows us that it is up to us to impart a meaning to things,
and ‘anguish’ reveals our 'terrible freedom' to decide our own fates. And Marcel refers to the
experience of ‘mystery’ in which we encounter that which defies our ability to gain intellectual
mastery through our problem-solving skills.

Some existentialists also talk about an experience of the absurd that can come over us in our
rationalistic age. Sartre claims that there are no ultimate grounds that validate our choices, so that
any fundamental project we adopt must be absurd in the sense that it is ultimately
unjustified. Camus' conception of the absurd is perhaps the best known of all, though it is not
really representative of existentialist thought. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942a), he describes the
feeling of futility we can experience when we become aware of the repetitiveness and
pointlessness of our everyday routines and rituals. For Camus, this feeling of the absurdity of
existence, a feeling in which suicide begins to seem like a real possibility, is the most
fundamental experience philosophy must confront.

Finally, many existentialists point to the experience of guilt as providing an insight into our own
being. Existential guilt refers to something broader than the feeling we sometimes have when we
have done something wrong. In its broadest significance, existential guilt refers to the fact that
there is no pre-given legitimation or justification for our existence. Though we are creatures who
feel the need for some 'reason for existing', we find ourselves thrown into a world where there is
no higher court of appeals that could validate our lives. We are ultimately answerable only to
ourselves. In a somewhat narrower sense, existential guilt can refer to the fact that, because we
are always engaged in acting in concrete situations, we are implicated in whatever happens in the
world, and so we always have, what Sartre calls, 'dirty hands'.
---

6 Authenticity
Experiences like anxiety and existential guilt are important, according to existentialists, because
they reveal basic truths about our own condition as humans. Everyday life is characterized by
'inauthenticity', and in our ordinary busy-ness and social conformism we are refusing to take
responsibility for our own lives. In throwing ourselves into socially approved activities and roles,
we disown ourselves and spin a web of self-deception in trying to avoid facing up to the truth
about what we are. This picture of inauthentic existence is contrasted with a vision of a way of
living that does not slide into self-loss and self-deception. Such a life is (using the term found
in Heidegger and Sartre) 'authentic'. Authenticity suggests the idea of being true to yourself - of
owning up to who you really are. However, it is important to see that authenticity has nothing to
do with the romantic ideal of getting in touch with an 'inner self' that contains one's true nature,
for existentialists hold that we have no pregiven 'nature' or 'essence' distinct from what we do in
the world.

If authenticity is not a matter of being true to some core of traits definitive of the 'real me', what
is it? For most existentialists, becoming authentic is first of all a matter of lucidly grasping the
seriousness of your own existence as an individual - the raw fact of the 'I exist' - and facing up to
the task of making something of your own life. Kierkegaard, for example, holds that the only
way to succeed in becoming a 'self' (understood as an 'existing individual') is by living in such a
way that you have 'infinite passion' in your life. This kind of intensity is possible, he thinks, only
through a ‘leap’, a total, life-defining commitment to something that gives your life an enduring
sense of meaning and significance. Nietzsche is also concerned with getting us to take hold of
our own lives in a more intense and clear-sighted way. To free people from the attempt to find
some overarching meaning for their lives, he proposes the idea of eternal recurrence: the idea
that everything that happens in your life has happened before in exactly the same way, and will
happen again and again, an endless number of times. If we accept this, Nietzsche suggests, we
will be able to embrace our lives as they are, on their own terms, without regrets or dreams about
how things could be different. Heidegger suggests that, in the experience of anxiety, one
confronts one's own 'naked' existence as 'individualized, pure and thrown'. As we become aware
of our 'being-towards-death' in this experience, we will grasp the weightiness of our own finite
lives, and we will then be able to seize on our own existence with integrity, steadiness and self-
constancy (see INTEGRITY § 5 ).

Many existentialists agree that owning up to one's own existence requires a defining commitment
that gives one's life a focus and sense of direction. For Kierkegaard, a religious thinker, self-
fulfillment is possible only for the 'knight of faith', the person who has a world- defining relation
to a particular being which has infinite importance (the eternal being who has existed in time, the
God-man). For Heidegger, authenticity requires 'resoluteness', a commitment to some specific
range of possibilities opened up by one's historical 'heritage'. The fact that the ideal of
commitment or engagement appears in such widely different existentialist works raises a
question about the distinction, first made by Sartre, between 'religious' and 'atheist'
existentialists. Kierkegaard, Marcel and Jaspers are often grouped together as religious
existentialists, yet there are profound differences in their views of the nature of religious
commitment. Where Kierkegaard emphasizes the importance of relating oneself to a concrete
particular, Marcel and Jaspers speak of a relation to the 'mystery' or to 'transcendence'
(respectively). At the same time, so-called 'atheist' existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre tend
to agree with Kierkegaard's view that being 'engaged' or having a 'fundamental project' is
necessary to achieving a focused, intense, coherent life. The distinction between atheist and
religious existentialists becomes harder to maintain when we realize that what is important for
religious thinkers is not so much the factual properties of the object of commitment as the inner
condition of faith of the committed individual. Thus, Kierkegaard says that what is crucial to
faith is not the 'objective truth' about what one believes, but rather the intensity and passion of
one's commitment (the 'subjective truth'). In making a commitment, then, ‘it is not so much a
question of choosing the right way as the energy, the earnestness, [and] the pathos with which
one chooses’ (Kierkegaard 1943b/1987b, 167).

The idea that intensity and commitment are central to being authentic is shared by all types of
existentialists. Another characteristic attributed to an authentic life by most existentialists is a
lucid awareness of one's own responsibility for one's choices in shaping one's life. For Sartre,
authenticity involves the awareness that, because we are always free to transform our lives
through our moment to moment decisions, if we maintain a particular identity through time, this
is because we are choosing that identity at each moment.
Similarly, Kierkegaard and Heidegger talk about the need to sustain our identity at each moment
through a 'repetition' of our choice of who we are because there is always a ‘temptation’ to slip
back into the conformist routines of the ‘they’. In recognizing our freedom to determine our own
lives, we also come to accept our responsibility for who we are.

The notion of authenticity is supposed to give us a picture of the most fulfilling life possible for
us after the 'death of God'. It calls on us to assume our own identities by embracing our lives and
making something of them in our own way. It presupposes lucidity, honesty, courage, intensity,
openness to the realities of one's situation, and a firm awareness of one's own responsibility for
one's life. But it would be wrong to think of authenticity as an ethical ideal as this is normally
interpreted. First, becoming authentic does not imply that one adopts any particular moral code
or follows any particular path: an authentic individual might be a liberal or a conservative, a
duty-bound citizen or a wild-eyed revolutionary. In this respect, authenticity pertains not
to what specific kinds of things you do, but how you live - it is a matter of the style of your life
rather than of its concrete content. Second, in formulating their different conceptions of
authenticity, many existentialists describe the ideal of authenticity in terms that suggest that it
can be opposed to ethics as ordinarily understood. Kierkegaard, for example, says that it is
possible that the knight of faith might have to 'transcend the ethical', and Nietzsche holds that
authentic individuals will live 'beyond good and evil'. Thus, authenticity seems to have more to
do with what is called the 'art of self-cultivation' than it does with ethics as traditionally
understood.

---

7 Criticisms
Existentialism has been criticized from a number of different angles. One line of criticism holds
that the emphasis on individual freedom and the rejection of absolutes in existentialism tends to
undermine ethics; by suggesting that everyday life is 'absurd' and by denying the existence of
fixed, binding principles for evaluating our actions, existentialists promote an 'anything-goes'
view of freedom that exacerbates the nihilism already present in contemporary life. Camus'
novel The Stranger (1942b), for example, has come under attack for glorifying immoral
'gratuitous acts' as a way of affirming one's own absolute freedom. In reply, supporters of
existentialism have noted that the stance portrayed in the work is not at all typical of
existentialist views, and that existentialism's ideal of freedom and its sense of the need for human
solidarity after the 'death of God', far from undermining ethics, might provide a very good basis
for a moral point of view in the modern world (see Existentialist ethics ).

Other critics have tried to show that the basic picture of reality presupposed by existentialism
necessarily leads to nihilism. Hans Jonas (1966 ) argues that existentialism, despite its avowed
goal of overcoming Cartesianism, tends to introduce a new kind of dualism with its sharp
distinction between humans (who are thought of as absolutely free centres of choice and action),
and an inert, meaningless 'being' that is on hand for humans to interpret and transform as they
please. Not only does this extreme opposition exclude animals from the realm of beings with
intrinsic worth, its view of humans as thrown into an indifferent universe seems to give us
freedom only at the cost of making nothing really worthy of choice.

This line of criticism is closely connected to the claim, formulated by various postmodern
theorists, that existentialism is still trapped within the assumptions of ‘Humanism’, a view now
supposed to have been discredited. Humanism in this context means the view, central to modern
philosophers from Descartes to Kant, that the human subject is immediately present to itself as a
centre of thought and action, and that the rest of the universe should be thought of as a collection
of things on hand to be represented and manipulated by the subject. Postmodern theorists claim
that a number of intellectual developments in the last two centuries have made it impossible to
accept this picture of the centrality of the subject. The semiotic theories of Saussure, for
example, have shown how language tends to work behind our backs, controlling our capacities
for thought and speech, and Freudian theory has shown how unconscious drives and desires lie
behind many of our conscious thoughts and actions. Given these developments, it is claimed, we
can no longer accept the idea that humans are capable of the sorts of self-transparency and self-
determination that seem to be presupposed by existentialists like Sartre (see Postmodernism ).

In reply to this objection, one might point out that most existentialists have been very critical of
the Cartesian belief in the transparency of consciousness to itself. Such themes as being-in- a-
situation, 'thrownness', embodiment and mystery show the extent to which many existentialists
think of humans as embedded in a wider context they can never totally master or comprehend.
Moreover, the existentialist description of humans as temporal beings whose 'present' is always
mediated by what is projected into the future and retained from the past undermines any
Cartesian conception of the immediate presence of self to self in self- awareness. Finally,
as Sonia Kruks (1990 ) argues, postmodern theorists seem to have run up against a wall in their
attempts to 'de-centre the subject'. Having identified the pervasive background structures that
influence the thoughts and actions of subjects, these theorists now find it difficult to give an
account of the kind of critical thinking they see as central to the postmodern stance. In Kruks'
view, existentialists have much to offer postmodern theory in formulating the conception of a
'situated subjectivity' that will fill this gap.
It is not clear what the future holds in store for existentialism understood as a philosophical
movement. Many of the ideas that sounded so exciting in Paris in the 1940s now seem terribly
old-fashioned. Many of the more viable themes in existentialism have been absorbed into new
philosophical movements, especially into hermeneutics with its emphasis on humans as self-
interpreting beings (see Hermeneutics ). While some existentialist writers have faded from the
scene, others have become more and more influential (though not always as existentialists).
Nonetheless, there has been an explosion of interest in Heidegger and Nietzsche recently, and the
works of Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Beauvoir are widely discussed. In the
following we will look more closely at existentialism’s relevance today.

8. Contemporary Relevance

Although it was initially ghettoized in mainstream Anglophone philosophy, there is a renewed

interest in applying existentialist thought in a number of core areas. In cognitive science, for
instance, English-speaking philosophers are increasingly turning to figures like Heidegger,
Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to challenge the long-standing assumption that human behaviour must
always be mirrored in or mediated by the cognizing mind. Beginning with the pioneering work
of Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty in the 1970s, these philosophers suggest that in our
everyday lives, we are already embedded in a world and engaged in skillful acts and practices in
ways that we are never explicitly conscious of and that are not accompanied by mental
representations. The upshot is that in our everyday lives, we are not necessarily thinking about
what we are doing because—as a way of being-in-the-world—we already embody a tacit
understanding of the situation we’ve been thrown into. This existentialist critique has forced
researchers in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to reevaluate the dominant mentalistic
picture of human agency.

Regarding human existence as an interpretive activity or event rather than an objectively present
substance has also influenced a generation of Anglo-American philosophers in developing a
narrative conception of the self. Important works by Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and
Bernard Williams have all drawn on existentialism to illuminate the ways in which humans are,
in Taylor’s words, ‘self-interpreting animals’ to the extent that we ‘make’ or ‘create’ our own
identities by constructing narratives or stories about who we are and what is at stake in our lives.
On this view, it is a mistake to reduce the self to a substance that is either mental (as a ‘thinking
thing’ or ego cogito) or physical (as the byproduct of neurophysiological brain states) because
we exist and understand who we are only in the interpretations and stories we choose to create
for ourselves. The process of self-making, on this view, is always ‘dialogical’ insofar as it occurs
in conversation with the cultural values and resources that are already opened up to us and that
we draw on to compose our life-story.

Existentialism is also continuing to make inroads in contemporary social and political theory by
focusing on ‘the human’ not as a universal genus or category but as a concrete ‘existing
individual’ that is always subject to the social and political forces unique to one’s own situation.
This attention paid to one’s lived-situation has allowed philosophers to give an experiential
account of those who have been marginalized or oppressed by the dominant cultural discourse.
Beauvoir, for example, shows how a woman born into a patriarchal world is ‘shaped in a mould
by her situation’ (1949/1952, 664), and this informs the woman’s narrow, passive, and
objectifying self-interpretation. And Fanon draws on the work of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-
Ponty to explore this aspect of situated oppression from the perspective of race in the context of
European colonialism. This has paved the way for an explosion of existentialism-informed
research in a wide range of areas, from feminist philosophy and critical race theory, to disability
and post-colonial studies.

The understanding that human existence is structured by the anguish and despair of our own
finitude has also brought existentialism into recent conversation with the Eastern philosophical
tradition, especially Buddhism. Notable comparative scholars such as David Loy and Stephen
Batchelor, for instance, have explored the ways in which the Buddhist notion of suffering (or
dukkha) as a manifestation of our clinging to worldly attachments and the illusory permanence of
the self reflects, in important ways, the existentialist notions of inauthenticity and self-deception.
Part of what it means to be authentic in both the existentialist and Buddhist traditions involves
owning up to our own structural impermanence which can, in turn, free us from our ordinary
tendency to cling to thing-like attachments and open us up to the possibility of being in the
present in a more focused, steady, and committed way.

Existentialism’s affinity to Buddhism is also evident in the non-dualistic conception of the self
advanced by figures such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and this has influenced new ways of
thinking about our relationship to the natural world and has had a significant impact on recent
developments in deep ecology and environmental philosophy. By rejecting the traditional view
of the human being as a cognizing subject that is separate and distinct from worldly objects,
existentialism illuminates the extent to which we are already bound up in a world that has
affective meaning for us, a meaning rooted in our own situated and embodied perspective.
Heidegger’s work has been decisive in this regard as he radically alters our standard
philosophical orientation toward the world, one that is based not on detached ‘knowledge’ of the
world but on the ways in which we enact a sense of ‘care’ and ‘concern’ for it. As environmental
philosopher Neil Evernden suggests, Heidegger’s recognition of our affective enmeshment in the
world transforms the Cartesian adage from ‘I think, therefore I am’ to ‘I care, therefore I am’
(1985, 70).

Finally, existentialism is having a significant impact on approaches to medicine and

interpretations of health and illness. Although its influence on psychiatry and psychotherapy is
well known, recently health care professionals have been drawing on existentialism to critique
the medical standpoint of scientific detachment which views the patient as on object of
investigation, focusing instead on the lived or experiential aspects of illness, on ‘what it means’
and ‘what it feels like’ to be ill. This shift in orientation hinges largely on the way existentialists
like Sartre, Beauvoir, Marcel, and Merleau-Ponty have reinterpreted the body, not as a physical
object with measurable functions but as a living-body. For these philosophers, the lived-body is
the experiential and mediating activity on the basis of which we affectively grasp the world and
understand ourselves. Healing, on this view, does not just involve treating the physiological
body; it also involves helping the patient interpret and give meaning to the experience of bodily
breakdown that they are living through. By focusing on the experiential ‘to be’ of illness rather
than the objective metrics of the disease, existentialism is increasingly finding its way into
cutting edge medical research in diverse areas such as narrative medicine, nursing, bioethics,
gerontology, and palliative care.
From the preceding discussion it is clear that existentialism should not be viewed as a moribund
or outdated movement but one that continues to play a vital and evolving role in contemporary
philosophy and social theory in both European and Anglo-American traditions. Whether or not
existentialism as such will continue to thrive, it seems that there will always be a place for the
style of critique of society and the concern with the concrete realities of life that are central to
existentialist thought. As a reactive movement, existentialism challenged the uncritical
assumptions of mainstream philosophy as well as the complacency of everyday social existence.
And, in its more positive side, it attempted to counteract the tendency to self-loss in
contemporary life by formulating a vision of the kind of coherent, focused way of living that
would provide a basis for meaningful action. These certainly seem to be valuable aims, and it is
likely that existentialist writers will always have important contributions to make toward
realizing them.

---

Bibliography

References and further reading

Aho, K. (2014) Existentialism: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity. (Accessible and
comprehensive introduction to the core themes of existentialism with an extensive bibliography)

Arp, K. (2001) The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics. Chicago:
Open Court. (Careful analysis of existentialist ethics from the perspective of Beauvoir)

Barnes, H. (1967). An Existentialist Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (One of the
first and most influential accounts of the moral implications in existentialism)

Barrett, W. (1958) Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. New York: Anchor
Books, reprinted 1962, 1990. (Pioneering and accessible introduction to existentialism with rich
historical and literary analyses and useful appendices)

Beauvoir, S. (1949) Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), trans. H. M. Parshley. New York:
Knopf, 1952. (Beauvoir’s masterwork of feminist phenomenology and existentialism)

Beauvoir, S. (1947) Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity), trans. B.
Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. (Beauvoir’s engagement with the limits and
possibilities of existentialist ethics)

Bernasconi, R. (2007) How to Read Sartre. New York: W.W. Norton. (Accessible and lively
introduction to Sartre’s entire corpus)

Blackham, H.J. (1952) Six Existentialist Thinkers , New York: Harper Torchbooks, 2nd
edn, 1959. (Dependable introductions to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger and
Sartre)
Buber, M. (1923) Ich und Du (I and Thou), trans. W. Kauffman. New York: Touchstone, 1970.
(Influential account of religious existentialism from a leading Jewish voice)

Busch, T.W. (1999) Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation: Essays on Late
Existentialism, New York: Fordham University Press. (Clearly written and engaging; mines
existentialist texts for insights that show their relevance for the most recent research in
Continental philosophy.)

Camus, A. (1942a) Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays), trans. J.
O'Brien, New York: Knopf, 1955. (The classic account of the 'absurdity' of everyday life.)

Camus, A. (1942b) L'Etranger (The Stranger), trans. S. Gilbert, New York:

Knopf, 1973. (Description of the kind of 'gratuitous act' discussed in §7 above.)

Cooper, D.E. (1990) Existentialism: A Reconstruction, Oxford: Blackwell; 2nd edn, 1999. (An
up-to-date and thorough survey of existentialist thought with a helpful bibliography.)

Cotkin, G. (2003) Existential America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Rich
account of the historical reception of existentialism in the United States)

Crowell, S. (ed.) (2012) Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. (Well-organized account of major themes and figures by leading scholars with
a helpful editors introduction)

Dilman, İ. (1993) Existentialist Critiques of Cartesianism, Lanham, MD: Barnes & Noble
Books. (Clear and interesting account of how existentialism criticizes ideas inherited
from Descartes; focuses primarily on Sartre and Marcel.)

Dostoevsky, F. (1864) Notes from the Underground, trans. Constance Garnett. Cambridge, MA:
Hackett Press, 2009 (Pioneering novella addressing the anguish of human freedom in the context
of modernity)

Dreyfus, H and Wrathall, M. (eds.) (2012) A Companion to Phenomenology and

Existentialism. Oxford: Blackwell. (Comprehensive commentary and analysis of core themes by
leading scholars)

Evernden, N. (1985) The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press. (Useful appropriation of Heidegger’s thought in the context of environmental
philosophy)

Flynn, T. (1984) Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(Excellent overview of the social and political implications of Sartre’s philosophy)

Flynn, T. (2006) Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(Concise, well written, and engaging summary of the movement)

Freidman, M. S. (1964) The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader. New York: Random
House. (Wide-ranging anthology that engages the major issues)
Golomb, J. (1995) In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus, London:
Routledge. (Clearly written survey of existentialist conceptions of authenticity.)

Gordon, H. (1999) Dictionary of Existentialism, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. (Helpful

reference book with cross-references)

Gordon, L. (2000) Existentia Africana: Understanding African Existential Thought, London:

Routledge. (A refreshing and engaging study of existential thought as it reflects on race, with
special emphasis on Fanon, Douglass and DuBois.)

Grossman, R. (1984) Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction, London: Routledge

& Kegan Paul. (A study of the rise of phenomenology that is most helpful in clarifying the
relation between Husserl and Sartre.)

Guignon, C. (ed.) (2003) The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,

Heidegger, and Sartre, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. (Scholarly essays by major
Anglophone philosophers on four major representatives of the existentialist tradition.)

Guignon, C. and Pereboom, D. (eds.) (1995) Existentialism: Basic Writings, Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing Company. (Core texts by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre, with
extensive introductions by the editors.)

Heidegger, M. (1927) Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), trans. J. Macquarrie and E.
Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962. (A seminal work: the first systematic presentation
of such existentialist themes as death, guilt, conscience, authenticity and being-in-the-world.)

Hoffman, P. (1983) The Human Self and the Life and Death Struggle, Gainesville, FL:
University of Florida Press. (Provocative and original account of the struggle for selfhood
drawing on the work of Heidegger and Sartre)

Jonas, H. (1966) 'Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism', in The Phenomenon of Life, New
York: Harper & Row. (Interesting criticisms of existentialism and especially of Heidegger.)

Joseph, F., Reynolds, J, and Woodward, A. (eds.) The Continuum Companion to

Existentialism, London: Continuum. (A comprehensive and contemporary survey of core themes
and figures)

Kaufmann, W. (1956) Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York: Meridian Books.
(Significant collection of primary texts of existentialism with an accessible editor’s introduction)

Kierkegaard, S. (1843a) Enten-eller (Either/Or, vols. 1 and II), trans. H.V. Kong and E.H.
Kong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987a vol. 1 and 1987b vol. 2 (Develops the
idea of different 'spheres of existence' in which humans live.)

Kierkegaard, S. (1843b) Frygt og Baeven (Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death),
trans W. Lowrie, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. (Kierkegaard's poetic evocation of the
'Knight of Faith'.)
Kierkegaard, S. (1846) Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler
(Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments), trans. W. Lowrie and D.
Swenson, Princeton University Press, 1941 (Famous critique of Hegel’s system and the
definitive existentialist account of subjective truth)

Kleinberg, E. (2005) Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Well-written account of Heidegger’s influence on French
existentialists)

Kruks, S. (1990) Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society , London:
Unwin Hyman. (Excellent study of the relevance of French existentialist thought to current
postmodern developments. Covers Marcel, Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.)

Loy, D. (1996). Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy,
Existentialism, and Buddhism, New York: Prometheus. (Groundbreaking interpretation of
existentialism in dialogue with psychoanalysis and Buddhist philosophy)

Macquarrie, J. (1972) Existentialism, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster. (A dependable and clear

survey of existentialist thought. Extensive bibliography listing older works on existentialism.)

Mahon, J. (1997). Existentialism, Feminism, and Simone de Beauvoir, London: Macmillan.

(Notable account of Beauvoir’s ethics as a response to Sartre)

Marcel, G. (1956) The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. M. Harrari. New York: Carol
Publishing Group. (Early introduction to existentialism by one of its most influential figures)

Marino, G. (ed.) (2004) Basic Writings of Existentialism, New York: Modern Library. (Up do
date collection of primary readings from leading figures)

May, R., Angel, E. and Ellenberger, H.F. (eds) (1958) Existence: A New Dimension in
Psychiatry and Psychology, New York: Basic Books. (Collection of classic readings in
existential psychoanalysis.)

McBride, W.L. (ed.) (1997) Sartre and Existentialism: Philosophy, Politics, Ethics, The Psyche,
Literature, and Aesthetics, New York: Garland, 8 vols. (Collections of classic essays in English
on existentialism, with volumes on its background and development.)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) Phénoménologie de la Perception (Phenomenology of Perception),

trans. C. Smith. New York: Routledge, 1962. (Pioneering account of perception, embodiment,
and freedom)

Michelman, S. (ed.) (2008) Historical Dictionary of Existentialism, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow

Press. (Helpful resource tool for key themes and figures)

Nietzsche, F. (1892) Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), trans. W.

Kaufman in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking, 1954. (Nietzsche's vision of
the Übermensch or 'superman'.)
 Olson, R. G. (1962) An Introduction to Existentialism, New York: Dover. (Excellent overview
of the movement with a focus on major figures)

Ortega y. Gasset, J. (1930) La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses), anonymous
trans. New York, W. W. Norton, 1932. (Authoritative account of existential revolt against
bourgeois conformism)

Ortega y Gasset, J. (1935) Historia como sistema (History as a System) trans. W. Atkinson in
Toward a Philosophy of History, New York, W. W. Norton, 1941a. (Important critique of
modernity, liberalism, and scientific progress)

Ortega y Gasset, J. (1939) Meditatión de la técnica (Man the Technician), trans. H. Weyl in
Toward a Philosophy of History, New York, W. W. Norton, 1941b. (Influential account of the
self as a relational tension between facticity and transcendence)

Richardson, J. (1986) Existential Epistemology: A Heideggerian Critique of the Cartesian

Project. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Useful appropriation of existentialism that dismantles
assumptions in mainstream epistemology)

Sartre, J.-P. (1943) L'Être et le Néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique (Being and
Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology ), trans. H.E. Barnes, New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956. (The most representative work of the existentialist tradition.)

Sartre, J.-P. (1946) L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism)

trans. B. Frechtman in C. Guignon and D. Pereboom (eds.) Existentialism: Basic Writings,
Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2001. (Influential, brief statement of Sartre's existentialist
views.)

Schrag, C.O. (1961) Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human

Finitude , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (A classic synthesis of different
existentialist philosophers and themes.)

Solomon, R.C. (1972) From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their
Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds, New York: Harper & Row. (The best account of
existentialism in its historical context.)

Tolstoy, L. (1886) The Death of Ivan Ilych, trans. A. Maude. New York: New American Library,
1960 (Classic existentialist novella addressing the anguish of confronting one’s own death)

Unamuno, M. (1912) Trágico de la vida (The Tragic Sense of Life), trans. J. E. Flitch. New
York: Dover Publication, 1954. (Spanish existentialist’s influential account of the human
situation)

Wahl, J. (1969) Philosophies of Existence: An Introduction to the Basic Thought of

Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, and Sartre, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul. (Difficult but trustworthy introduction by a respected French scholar.)

Warnock, M. (1970) Existentialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Clear exposition of the
basic concepts.)
Wilson, Colin. (1966) Introduction to the New Existentialism, London: Hutchinson; repr. as The
New Existentialism, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1986. (An engaging and accurate account of
existential thought by a master stylist; as timely and helpful today as when it first appeared.)

Vogel, L. (1994) The Fragile “We”: Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time.
(Excellent account and critique of existentialist ethics from the perspective of Heidegger)

Yalom, I.D. (1980) Existential Psychotherapy, New York: Basic Books. (Well-written and
insightful study of existentialist themes and their relevance to psychotherapy.)