20th Century Existentialism



Use the brief discussions below to help you process what you read in chapter 32 of Sophie's World and expand your understanding of the context in which Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir worked. Reading this web page will not suffice as a substitute for the assigned readings on existentialism.




I.
 Precursors to 20th Century Existentialism





While many thinkers helped shape what Existentialism would become in the 20th century, the following five are particularly relevant.





A.
 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)






Hegel's dialectic method of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis provided a way of interpreting history that would strongly influence some later existentialists. His method, and the historical doctrine that accompanied it, provided a way for later thinkers to shift the focus of philosophy away from otherworldliness (the world of ideas, or heaven) and onto the historical realities of human development, but Hegel was himself a rationalist or idealist.





B.
 Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)






Kierkegaard is considered by many to be the founder of Existentialism. Much of his thought was a reaction to the rationalism (or idealism) of Hegel. Kierkegaard said that abstract thought ignores the concrete and temporal. Our existence, he argued, is passionate and comic, not rational. It is completely subjective.

Kierkegaard did not deny that objective truth exists, only that we can know it. His argument that we can never know objective truth shifted the focus of philosophy away from attempts to establish "the real" as an objectively verifiable entity and onto analysis of our subjective experience.





C.
 Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)






Karl Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, founded a school of  philosophy known as dialectical materialism. They were influenced by Hegel's dialectical view of history, but like Kierkegaard, they rejected Hegel's idialism. Also like Kierkegaard, they shifted the focus of philosophy away from "otherworldly" concerns and onto the historical world of human experience.

While many later existentialists would not agree with all of Marx and Hegel's social program, they accepted the thesis that philosophy should be about human existence in history, not about the abstract views of the nature of ultimate reality.





D.
 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)





Friedrich Nietzsche thought that both Christian theology and the Western philosophical tradition had drawn attention away from existence in the physical world. Christian theology had pointed toward "heaven" as the true goal of human existence, and philosophy had pointed toward the world of ideas, seeing that as more real than the physical world. Nietzsche considered this other world to be a pseudo world. The real world, for Nietzshce, was none other than the day-to-day world in which we exist. This element of Nietzsche's thought reflects the same general movement toward discussion of human existential experience seen in the other thinkers mentioned above.








II.
 Existentialism in the 20th Century





A.
 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)






While several 20th century thinkers are often called existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre is generally taken as the most influential contributer to this perspective. He was the most radical of the French Existentialists.

A member of the resistence against the Nazis in World War II, Sartre was eventually captured. In captivity his view of freedom as "complete responsibility in total solitude" reached its fullest expression. Subjected to torture, he concluded that while his torturers could force him to say things he did not believe, they could never force him to believe anything against his will. The content of the mind is, therefore, radically free, and for it we are radically responsible.

This conviction that freedom and responsibility are fundamentally linked grew over the course of Sartre's life. His writings show this growing association.

In his early novel Nausea (started in 1931, published in 1938) Sartre expressed a profound solipsistic despair. In a way reminiscent of Berkeley, he argued that we cannot prove that other people exist. Because of this we are marooned within ourselves.

In Being and Nothingness (1943) Sartre distinguished between the being-in-itself of objects that simply are and the being-for-itself by which we engage in independent action. He explored emotion as a spontaneously conscious activity that we project onto reality. Asserting that all human action is radically free, Sartre warned of the dangers of bad faith, acting on the basis of self-deceptive motives to try to evade responsibility for our actions.

We are radically responsible for our actions because as humans our "existence precedes essence." That is, there is no essence of human nature that makes us act in a particular way; we exist, and we define human nature, making it what it is by our decisions. Humans have no innate nature; we must create ourselves. We must decide for ourselves how we will live and accept responsibility for our decisions.

Similarly, Sartre argued that life has no inherent meaning. Still, life must have meaning; we must create that meaning, giving life meaning by our own decisions.

In Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) Sartre continued his argument that freedom means total responsibility. This radical responsibility leads to feelings of anguish (angst) and despair. Genuine human dignity, he argues, is experienced only when we conciously/actively accept these emotions. Feelings of anguish and despair are not reasons to reject the link between freedom and responsibility; they are the test of our human dignity.

In his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) Sartre attempted to weave together his existentialist views and the growing marxism of his time. Rejecting the deterministic elements of earlier marxism (the view that class struggle is inherent to human existence and therefore unavoidable), he proposed existentialism as a way to humanize marxism.

Sartre claimed that existential questions have no final answers. Philosophical questions must be asked again in each generation, and indeed by each individual. His own life was an attempt to answer them for himself in his own context. His answers were not simply theoretical; they had very practical results for his political activity. He was branded a traitor and his apartment was bombed when he opposed the French war to suppress the Algerian struggle for independence.






For more on Sartre, click here.





B.
 Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)


(Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir)






Simone de Beauvoir was the most distinguished female writer in France at her time. She was a life-long companion of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Just as Sartre denied the existence of a basic human nature, Simone de Beauvoir denied the existence of a basic feminine nature or male nature. She saw attempts to describe "female nature" or "male nature" as endeavors guided by prejudice and said that women and men must liberate themselves from such prejudices. We exist, and we create our essence by our decisions.

She wrote many books, the most famous of which is The Second Sex (1949). In this work she argued that when men act as subjects, treating women as their objects, they deprive women of responsibility for their own lives. Women must resist being treated in this way and choose to be free and responsible.






For more on Simone de Beauvoir, click here.








III.
 Conclusion





Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Engles, and Nietzsche all contributed to a shift in Western philosophy away from metaphysical concerns to a focus on the experience of human existence. In the 20th century Sartre gave the most lasting expression to existentialism and Simone de Beauvoir applied existentialism most directly to feminist concerns.





While Existentialism has been an incredibly diverse movement that some have called a "shared mood" rather than a philosophy, Sartre, the inventor of the term "existentialism," defined it in a fairly straight forward way: an existentialist is a philosopher who is guided by the idea that, as far as humans are concerned, "existence precedes essense." We are what we are, not because of a "human nature" (essense) that existed before us, but because of our own decisions. We exist, and we create our essence (human nature).