essays in existentialism clexa

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Essays in existentialism

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Uploaded by station22.cebu on October 1, 2020

Fan Fiction Friday: 7 Clarke/Lexa Stories To Force You Into The 100

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by rory midhani

Thanks to your gentle, persistent encouragement, I am finally all caught up on The 100 , and am now digging into the deliriously good part of fandom that houses all the Clarke and Lex fan fiction! I asked my Clexa-loving friends to recommend some fic to me, and these were their top 7 stories. But I need more, okay? More. (MORE, MORE, MORE.) Will you share more with me in the comments below? Me and my three-hour flight tomorrow thank you in advance.

they take their shots but we’re bulletproof by nightshifted

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa Plot: Clexa sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. Length: 10,000 words

Lexa is giving her a choice, Clarke slowly comes to understand, and her grip on her gun loosens. In a world of forced decisions that stain Clarke’s hands with more blood than she can wash off in her lifetime, in this one instant, Clarke has a choice. I do trust you, Clarke, Lexa had told her between whispers of hope and genuine affection, and Clarke aches at the realization that Lexa holds strong to that trust, would put her life on the line to prove that even if Clarke will never be able to reciprocate that trust, she can still have hers. It is the most reckless and stupid thing Lexa has ever done, Clarke thinks as she lowers her gun and gathers ammunition of a different kind. “Tell me why you really came here,” Clarke says, clipping her gun back into her belt. “Tell me, and I’ll go with you.” At that, Lexa softens. “You know why.” “Say it.” “Clarke.” “ Say it. “

when love becomes the reason by clarkesquad

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa Plot: It’s a Neighbors fake-dating AU! Length: 2,300 words

“Wait, are you telling me you’re 23 years old and you’re already some big CEO?” Clarke hops onto one of Lexa’s marble countertops and tips back a glass of wine. It’s probably the most expensive alcohol she’s had in years. “No, I’m a Manager, it’s much different. I answer to a Director, who answers to a Vice President, who answers to the CEO.” “And everyone who isn’t the Director or the Vice President or the CEO… answers to you.” “Not exactly. There are multiple Directors, multiple Vice Presidents, and multiple Managers. I don’t answer to them, but they don’t answer to me, and the people who answer to them don’t necessarily answer to me.” “You work in a tall building and you’re in charge.” Clarke clarifies. “Essentially.” “Impressive.” “Thank you.” Lexa smiles into her wine glass. She’s proud of herself. Clarke would be too. “What do you do, Clarke?” “I wheel patients around hospitals… pretty much all day long.”

fearless. by lordvoldyfarts

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa Plot: 20,000 words Length: Every ship needs a cross-country road trip fic.

Lexa is already settled into the passenger seat, buckled and everything, when Clarke slides back in. The windows are opened just a crack and the radio is playing softly, though Lexa doesn’t recognize the tune coming from it. Clarke seems to though because she’s humming along to it the moment she settles down into the seat. Her fingers are tapping against the steering wheel and she gets ready to put the car into drive. “I have a full tank, so we should be good to go for a few hours at least. If you get hungry, just let me know and I’ll pull over.” Clarke says, looking over her shoulder for any oncoming cars. Seeing none, she begins to pull out of the parking spot. She looks over at Lexa. “Or if you just want to stop because you see something fun.” She shrugs after her addition, shooting her eyes back to the road. Lexa stares at her for a moment.

“We’re going home, Clarke. This isn’t a vacation.” Lexa responds noncommittally, as if it were the most obvious thing on the planet. Clarke shrugs.

“That doesn’t mean it has to be boring.” She says and that makes Lexa look over to her. She isn’t looking at her and the morning sun is illuminating her profile beautifully. She really is a pretty girl. Her eyes seem to sparkle the way the light is reflecting on to them and Lexa swears she feels her stomach drop. How uncomfortable.

Forged in War by RavenclawGenius

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa Plot: “Lexa can be patient, for Clarke.” Length: 38,000 words

It is not so much that Clarke is mysterious, for, to Lexa, she is not; to Lexa, Clarke is an amalgamation of characteristics that she has seen before – but never presented in one form. Clarke is not a mystery so much as a puzzle made of pieces that do not quite merge in line. For Lexa, it is the contradiction of Clarke that first captures her interest. For Clarke is strong, and kind, but she is also pliable; she is willing to do what must be done, but she is smart about doing so only when necessary. She is willing to lead, though she is still learning what that means. Clarke is willing to sacrifice all for the safety of her people, and for peace. Still, Clarke is determined to hold on to the scraps of her humanity, even in the darkest of times, and even when Lexa knows that it can lead only to Clarke’s own suffering. Lexa does not understand why. Still, Lexa does what she can for her. She offers advice of things that she herself has learned throughout her rule that have saved her the agony that she now watches Clarke suffer through. It is not enough. It is not enough, because Clarke hides her anguish from all – Lexa’s people; her own people – but Lexa sees. Lexa peers through the jaded cracks of silver in Clarke’s blue eyes of steel, and she sees the vulnerability there; she sees Clarke’s pain, and, as Commander, there is only so much that Lexa has the power to do in this regard. Lexa feels angry at Clarke’s people – for Clarke will do (and has already done) everything for them, but the Sky People have no desire to see what her actions have wrought. They are content to live on and crucify Clarke for her decisions, believing her a monster, but they make no attempt to see what those decisions have cost her. They refuse to look, and therefore do not see. Lexa cannot help but to look.

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa Plot: Clexa Hogwarts AU, y’all!

“Raven, we can’t blow up the Slytherin common room. End of story.” Lexa responds. Raven huffs. “It would just be stink bombs, come on! Maybe they’d smell too bad to come out onto the pitch and play us.” Raven continues and Lexa purses her lips. “And would you really want to win by default and not by our own merit?” Lexa questions and Raven’s eyes roll. “If it means I don’t have to get up before the sun rises every single morning, yes.” She grumbles and Lexa just shakes her head. She bows her head and continues to read her Prophet. “Oi, Griffin! Get over here and talk some sense into your girlfriend.” Raven nearly yells across the Great Hall and Lexa’s head shoots up. Clarke has just walked in, speaking in hushed tones with Bellamy, but now she’s looking over at Raven and Lexa with an amused smile. Lexa is blushing and she pinches Raven’s arm. She jumps and glares over at Lexa. “Ow! What the bloody hell was that for?” She says and Lexa’s jaw is clenched. “You know very well what that was for.” Lexa hisses and Raven straightens her back and smirks. “You listen to her a right load better than you listen to me.” Raven shrugs as Clarke makes her excuses to Bellamy and starts to walk over to the Ravenclaw table. She slips onto the bench across from Lexa, whose face is still flushed, and raises an eyebrow. “What’s she done this time?” She asks, gesturing toward Lexa, who says, “Absolutely nothing.” At the same time that Raven says, “Gone mad.” And Lexa flares her nostrils and kicks the top of Raven’s leg. She winces and Lexa smirks. “Raven’s just a little upset with my chosen practice times.” Lexa directs toward Clarke.

The Wrestle by coeur-d’astronaute

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa Plot: “One year after the Battle of Mouth Weather. Life in the aftermath and the continual struggle to survive. Life flourishes in every way as two leaders figure out how to live with the new peace.” Length: 62,000 words

“Listen, I got these,” Clarke held out her arm as she pointed at her side, “Because I was sloppy and weak and Reapers were strong. Not because of you.” “We both lost many things that day, Clarke of the Sky People.” The Commander sensed the sadness that came through in anger. She knew that feeling. But Lexa never told Clarke of the days she spent checking on her in the Sky Healer’s room. She didn’t tell her that she had her best healers work on her as well. There was an abundance of pride between them. “We won. It’s a celebration of victory for a reason,” Clarke corrected, purposefully missing the meaning. “I missed you. Let’s not let the day ruin that. I’m glad you returned safely.” Clarke shook her head again as she took a step to head back, shaking away it all, away her relief at seeing her friend, at the safety she provided, at the day, at the entire past, and especially at trying to shake her head enough to rid her of the thought of Lexa’s eyes when her forehead furrowed in thought. She was stopped by a hand on her arm, making her stall. “I missed you, as well,” Lexa confessed, apologetic for upsetting the person she was most eager to see upon her return for a myriad of reasons. “Thank you for your drawings. They made me miss home, which… is new.” Again, without knowing how, perhaps it was in honesty or confession, Lexa thought, that she made Clarke smile, a small smile, one that pulled at half of her lips, one that she tried to hide. “You’ve really lost your formal rigidity in a year,” Clarke teased, causing the leader to drop her hand and flex her jaw. “Maybe you’ve lost your killer edge since these alliances mean less war.” “Make no mistake at my capacity to kill when the time calls for it,” Lexa corrected, lifting her chin slightly. Clarke could feel the times she shifted into Commander mode, could feel a regality, a realness to the role, to fitting it, to being it, that she herself never thought she possessed. “Do not confuse my fondness of you for weakness of character.” “Love is weakness,” Clarke reminded her.

Aftermath by Ruler of Destiny

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa Plot: Clarke accidentally proposes to Lexa. Length: 8,7000 words

Clarke sighed in relief, pushing Lexa back so that she could lay on top of her. “Good.” she said, nuzzling the Commander’s neck. “Wake me up at noon.” There was no denying that she enjoyed this position, and she indulged in it for several minutes. It was relaxing to just have Clarke in her arms, not worrying about impending war or the deadly wildlife. But. “Clarke. I would like to eat.” No answer. “And change.” Still nothing. Checking, she realized that her partner had truly fallen asleep, most likely worn out from the long days of dancing, fighting, and being lectured. With a soft smile, she gently pushed Clarke off of her. Unfortunately, her attempt at escape was rejected by the slumbering blonde, and Lexa found herself pulled down and wrapped in strong arms. “Clarke. Wake up.” The girl huffed, burying her face into her prisoner’s chest. Lexa swallowed. It looked like she was going to have to be creative about undressing.

Okay, will you share your favorites with me now?

Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram .

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

Essays in Existentialism: Reunited

Clarke and Lexa (who were dating on the ark) were separated the day Clarke was sent to the ground with The 100. When the Ark came down, Lexa was the only survivor in her station, and was taken in by the grounders, where the two of them, out of all places, are eventually reunited. But a lot of things have happened since they last saw each other— and the two are no longer the same people they once knew.

The explosions on the other side of the mountain make the horses buck, make them sprint and paw the ground anxiously. The pack of hunters watch from the edge of the forest as the giant object crashes into the Earth, so hard that even miles away they can feel the ground shake with the impact. For just a few seconds, an unnatural silence blankets everything.

“What do you think that was?” Bellamy swallows and looks over at Clarke before looking back at the smoke filling the sky.

“I think that was whatever was left of the Ark,” she whispers, brow furrowing, wondering if anyone would have survived three more months, let alone that crash.

The party all stand stark still, the grounders whispering to each other in their language about what it could be, and what it meant. The afternoon light fades slightly as they remain for what feels like an eternity.

“We must go tell the Commander,” Knox decides, sheathing his weapon. “The Mountain will be in the area soon.

“We have to go see if any of our people are down there,” Clarke argues, a flash of nostalgia twisting her gut as she realizes she is about over 300 murders different than she was when she, too, fell to the ground. But this reminded her of what she once was. Beneath the warpaint smeared across her temples and cheeks, she fought to find some unhardened bit.

“Clarke, the Mountain already has over a dozen of our people. We aren’t taking risks,” Octavia reminds her as the grounders grow uneasy.

With a final glance over her shoulder, Clarke nods and vows to sneak away as soon as possible.

The ringing in her ears is so severe, she is certain her brain is going to melt and escape through her mouth. So severe, she cannot even open her eyes. So deafening that she can feel her jaw crack and creak whens he goes to ask for help, and nothing else.

By the time her eyes open, the world is spinning and all she can see is white. Lexa tries to move her hands, tries to reach for something but fails desperately and pulls against the restraints. Strangers in protective suits hover above her as she eyes grow wide and frantically search for something familiar.

She makes sounds, although she cannot hear them. Words gargle out of her mouth and her head moves from side to side as she looks for answers though her brain is far too preoccupied to actually find any.

Though the captors move their mouths, Lexa cannot understand them, nor can she read their lips. She feels hands on her shoulders, pinning her down.

“She’s in bad shape,” Cage worries. “We should drain her.”

“Don’t you hear what she’s saying?” the doctor fills a needle, nudging her chin towards the terrified girl on her table. “She knows their leader.”

“Clarke!” the name comes out in a yelp, swallowed down and garbled as it is.

“She’s valuable if we ever want to get the rest of those who landed. And her blood won’t put a dent in how much we need.”

“Fix her up,” he agrees as the needle breaks skin and the girl calms into a slumber. “Do not tell my father who she could be. He doesn’t understand the threat that the new alliance outside had made for us.”

The burns on her side healed the slowest. The bruising on her body seems permanent, but every day, Lexa feels a little stronger, is able to stay up a little longer without needing hours of rest. It is slow to recover from crashing into the planet, but she tries to be patient. It never has been a strong suit for her.

The crisp whiteness of the walls of her room make her uncomfortable. She aches for some sort of reprieve from it but knows she couldn’t make it to the door, if she tried.

“You are looking much better than the first time I saw you,” an elderly man smiles as he strolls into the room quietly. Lexa swallows and turns her head to the door, away from the painting of the ballerina, her only source of colour and distraction. “Though, I suppose you might not remember that. You were in a bit of shock.”

“Who are…” Lexa coughs as she sits up. “Where am I?”

“You are safe. You are among friends. May I?” he pulls the chair forward. Apprehensively she nods after a moment.

“Friends who are keeping me prisoner?”

“You are not a prisoner.”

“Who are you?”

“I am the president of this community, Dante Wallace. You’ve already met my son, Cage. He rescued you.”

“Why am I a prisoner?”

“Lexa, isn’t it?” he leans forward. “You are here in the clinic ward because you are special. You fell from the sky and survived. Unfortunately, we have been underground since the bombs, and the outside air is poisonous to us. These are both precautions for us, and for your injuries as well. I can promise you that you will come to no harm here. And you are lucky, too. I cannot say the same if you had stayed out there.”

“What’s… out there?” Lexa swallows.

“Creatures. Barbarians. Death.”

“What about the other stations? There has to be more that survive.”

“Some, yes,” he nods. Lexa closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. She made a promise once, and she the hope that she could fulfill it still rang anew in her lungs, just louder than the searing pain that seemed to live in her skin. “Rest, Lexa. We have much work to do together.”

The tent is full of mingling by the time Clarke barges in, as she became known to do. It grows quiet as she storms to the front, demanding time with the Commander.

By the time she went to the drop ship, it had been wretched open by the Mountain Men. No bodies remained, no sign or signal as to who had been there, or if any lived or even died. And she hated herself for not being back soon enough.

It was Lexa’s station, though, and Clarke could not shake the feeling of her girlfriend being there. Renewed was the hope that she hid deep inside herself ever since she had to survive on the ground. Now it burns her alive.

“What a surprise,” Anya sighs, disinterested on the throne as the blonde appears. “Our fearless sky liaison is back to demand something.”

“It’s about the crashed station,” Clarke begins, ignoring the jab.

“Of course it is,” the leader shakes her head and toys with her knife. “I have a new clan that everyone wants me to kill and who keep asking for favours, an impending war from the North, Reapers growing in numbers, and a Mountain that likes to kidnap my people. But let’s focus on the scrap metal that landed in our backyard. Please,” she waves her hand. “Enlighten us, Clarke of the Sky People.”

“I want to go to the Mountain.”

The quiet stays for a moment before laughter erupts. Clarke feels her cheeks burn though she does not look away, her gaze strong as it focuses upon the Commander who merely smirks at the notion.

“By all means, Clarke,” she simply shrugs. “Go on. I’m sure they will welcome you with open arms. Is this a joke?”

“You want to end the Reapers? You want to get your people back? There’s only one way to do it.”

“And how do you propose this works? You getting killed and then what does that do for us except strain relations with your people.”

“If I can find my way out, I can find my way back in,” Clarke decides. “You know what it is in there, Anya.”

“Why the sudden desire to go back, Clarke?” Her words grow bitter.

“If there were survivors on that drop ship, they are my people, and they are in danger.”

“The last time you were in the Mountain, you killed a dozen of their guards. I do not think they will welcome you with open arms.”

“Let me get the door open for you, and then we can take it down together.”

“And if you die?”

“My people will understand.”

“Now you want me to declare war on the Mountain?”

“Yes.”

“It’s been months since that ship came down. Anyone on board has been killed and thrown out by now.”

“Then I want to kill them all even more,” Clarke growls, fist clenching. Anya eyes her apprehensively before sitting back on the throne. She looks around at her warriors before looking back at her hands in her lap.

“What were you thinking?” she relents.

By the second bone marrow extraction, Lexa begins to realize she truly is a prisoner, despite all assurances otherwise. By the time she starts to fight it, there is less and less opportunity for escape.

By the time the third appointment starts, Lexa figures out what she has to do. She does not like it, but she knows. When the nurse comes in, Lexa only feels the way his skull cracks and the warmth of the blood as it sprays in her face. The white scrubs become splashed in red and for a moment, Lexa is unsure of who she is and what she has done.

The first time she is outside of the room, she scrambles away until her back hits the wall and she drops the bloody lamp. There isn’t time to think though, to fathom what she has suddenly become capable of doing, as guards turn the corner and she has to run.

Bare feet padding along the cement, Lexa takes a corner and grabs a fire extinguisher.

Before she can do anything with it, she feels arms wrapping around her as she screams. The fire extinguisher goes into his gut.

As soon as the guard doubles over, Lexa swings once more, knocking him to the ground. She grabs the gun on his hip and the tag on his vest before continuing to run.

Frantically, she stumbles and fumbles with the key at the door. The sirens start to go and the strobes blink above her, but still, she presses on. Guards turn down the hall telling her to stop, their voices muffled behind the gas masks. When she doesn’t, they start to shoot as she runs through the door.

The first time her feet touch dirt, she’s confused for a second, though cannot allow herself a moment to think about it. Instead, she just runs, keeps running, follows the small prick of light at the end of the tunnel.

By the time she makes it to the end, more voices, more noises, more shouting and a different kind of threat. Nothing deters her. She shoots and she runs and she doesn’t look back. The entirety of the most vibrant green stretches out before her. The daylight would have blinded her if it weren’t for the rain, but the difference between it and the artificial light of the bunker hurts. She feels branches and stones scratching and cutting her legs as brambles rip at her arms and face, but still she presses forward. The sound of the chase continues and her lungs can’t work. The holes where they bore into her ache and the metal of the gun makes her hands shake.

With a loud crash, thunder starts and the sky opens. Lexa is certain she will drown, that she’ll never breathe again. As she reaches the edge of the cliff, she slides to a stop just in time before tumbling over into the churning waters below. Well over a dozen guards appear, guns focused on her.

For a moment, Lexa looks up at the sky slightly and feels the rain on her face.

“Come on, Lexa. There is nothing out here for you,” Cage mutters as the guards clear a path for him.

“If Clarke is alive, she’s out here.” He takes a step towards her and she cocks the gun, though it shakes. “Don’t.”

“This doesn’t end with you living.”

“You either,” she smiles and pulls the trigger, clipping him in the shoulder as she turns and jumps.

Despite the noise, the yelling and occasional riffs of gunfire in the distance, Clarke makes her way methodically through the Mountain looking for any sign of life of Lexa. Once Cage let her know a few weeks ago that he had her, Clarke was renewed, she was reborn, and she was unstoppable, ready to tear the mountain down stone by stone if that was what it came to, with her bare hands even.

“She’s not here,” Bellamy sighs, leaning against the door. “He could have been lying.”

“How would he have known her name, Bell?” “I don’t know. Heard you talking while you were here, found records. Something.”

“She was here,” Clarke shakes her head and continues to let her eyes appraise the room before shaking her head and moving to the next.

“We have a lot of work to do.”

“Go do it.”

“You can’t waste all this time–”

“Aha!” she interrupts, picking something up from the ground. A second later, a small pendent drops from her hand as she holds up the necklace to which it is attached. Grinning like a madman, Clarke stares at it as it swings gently. “She’s on the ground. She was here.”

“We don’t know how long, and we don’t know where. If she’s not here, she was probably–”

“Don’t. She’s alive.”

“How do you know?”

“I would know if she wasn’t.”

For a week, Lexa wanders. She exists on what she can, she freezes at night and burns during the day. Her feet grow rough and her entire body is a new level of filthy she never truly imagined. The blood from her first kill still stains her face. The blood from her second and third are newer. She does not allow herself to think of it, instead she tries to make her way back to where she wrecked because it is the only thing she knows of the ground, and even that is useless, essentially.

It got to be too much.

Convinced she would die, she laid on the dirt and refused to get up, but instead pressed herself into the ground as much as she could, felt it, pressed her palms into it and wondered how she managed to make it here, to this.

She had been careful. She knew there was one bullet left in the gun. At night she stared at it in the dim light of the small fire she can sometimes manage that goes out too quickly. Her entire body aches, her entire body is ravaged with open wounds and dirt caked atop barely there clothes.

Staring at the sky once more, at the fluffy white clouds she’d dreamt about, Lexa swallows and brings the gun to her temple, wincing as it rests against her head for the first time. She’d killed people. That registered with her finally after battling with her innate need to repress it.

Finger on the trigger, Lexa waits. Her breathing grows deep and angry until she pulls the gun away, her cheeks now stained in warm, mucky tears.

If she still had enough strength in her body to hold a gun, she had enough to keep looking for Clarke.

“You have to rest,” Octavia warns as they continue to move in larger and larger circles, all radiating out from the Mountain. There is the occasional hint of a trail, though no way to determine who it belongs to, and thus they follow as far as they can before continuing the large circles.

“I’ve rested long enough.”

“Are you going to look forever?”

“Yes.”

“It will be dark by the time we get back if we start now.”

“You can go,” Clarke mutters.

“There are still Reapers in the woods, Clarke. We can start again at first light.” Ignored, Octavia spurs her horse forward, cutting off the undaunted searcher. “I mean it, Clarke. No sense getting yourself killed. Be smart.”

As much as she wants to argue, to fight, she is quite certain Octavia has no problem taking her back to camp by force. The sun sinks again and Clarke clucks, guiding her horse back towards the dropship, despondent once again at the results of the day.

They are silent the entire way back as the grey darkness becomes absolute and they move by memory towards the faint twinkle of their home. Octavia wants to say something, but deep down she knows that none of the words would make a difference or lighten the burden her friend felt. And so she remains quiet.

“If she escaped before the battle, she might have gotten out the same way I did,” Clarke finally thinks aloud as she hops off of the horse.”

“The river?”

“Tomorrow I’ll follow it and try to find something.” The gates open and Clarke starts to lead her horse inside before pausing, as if because of the wind itself. “Did you hear that?” she turns to Octavia.

Out of instinct, their hands move to their weapons, draw them as they hear a shuffling by the tree line. The whisper comes out as an almost bark, but Clarke is certain she hears it.

“Lexa?” she drops her gun immediately. She squints and peers through the darkness at the figure that has emerged from the shadows.

Covered in dirt and mud, the only thing she can see is the relieved kind of smile that glows in the torch light. Eyes closed and head tilted back, all Lexa can do is smile and laugh despite the pain in her body, the aching in her bones, the hunger that claws through her throat in warm waves, the delirium of not sleeping. She is convinced she has finally died, that it was a dream, a terrible dream, but she reached some kind of salvation for the purgatory.

“I told you I’d find you,” she laughs, unable to stop. Clarke watches as she drops to her knees and looks to the sky in relief. “I found you. I found you.”

Overcome, the blonde watches her girlfriend collapse a second later.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Existentialism

Author: Addison Ellis Category: Phenomenology and Existentialism , Ethics Word Count: 1000

Video below

1. Mr. Green

Mr. Green is many things: a teacher, a husband, a father, a college graduate, and a medical patient, to name a few. Some of his features may be counted as accomplishments, others failures, and yet others unlucky accidents thrust upon him by the world. But is this all there is to Mr. Green?

According to the philosophical tradition of Existentialism , something is missing in this characterization. For the existentialist, we are not merely a collection of facts; we are also self-conscious, living, caring beings . While trees, seagulls, and fish are all similarly alive , they do not live the same sorts of lives that we do. Existentialism is the philosophical science of our peculiar sorts of lives. 1

Our lives are ongoing activities . Mr. Green’s existence, just like the existence of every similarly self-conscious, caring being, is more than a series of events or a set of facts. In providing such an understanding, Existentialism breathes new life into old ideas about the nature of value, freedom, and even more broadly into questions about the nature of reality and knowledge. In this essay, we will restrict our focus to what existentialists have to say about human nature and living a meaningful life. 2

2. Existence Precedes Essence

Many philosophers, both historical and contemporary, believe that the way something is is determined by its essence . That is, essences are fixed determinants of the way things are.

Those who follow this line of thought may take essences to be the non-physical and eternal standards to which things conform. 3 Thus, the essence of a table is what determines table-like behavior. Likewise, the essence of a human being is what determines what a human being is like. These fixed determinants can range from principles given by God to those we attribute to society.

Martin Heidegger helpfully points out that we often speak of the way “one” does things, referring to no one in particular. We say things like “this is the way one does x ,” because doing x correctly means doing it in accordance with some pre-established standard. 4 But Heidegger believes that this way of thinking should not extend to our ways of living. That is, we should not understand ourselves as living correctly only when we live “as one lives.” Existentialism reverses this picture by suggesting that it is our living which determines our essence, and not the other way around.

Let’s go back to Mr. Green. In order to understand what sort of being he is, we must understand that who he is is not a fact he was born with, nor is it a fact that was established merely after some important events in his life unfolded. He is who he is because of what he chooses , and one can never stop choosing. For even by trying to decide that I will no longer make choices, I am making the choice not to choose. Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous of the historical existentialists, expresses the idea that we are who we make ourselves, and not who we are pre-determined to be, with a concise slogan: “existence precedes essence.” 5

3. Freedom & Authenticity

If Sartre is right and our lives are essentially up to us, then existentialists must also be committed to a robust kind of freedom , since we are not determined by what happens to us.

But if Mr. Green’s essence is up to him, and he’s free to craft his essence as he pleases, then on what standards does he draw to guide himself in his crafting? It would seem that existentialists cannot simply draw from a set of independently existing standards. If this were so, then who we are is again simply a matter of conforming to some pre-established standards.

If the standards are up to us, then why should we choose any one set of standards over any other? That is, how can we make sense of the idea that there is a right way to live and a wrong way to live if there is no external standard for judging whether we have made the right choice ? 6

This is a difficult issue in Existentialism, one that is grappled with by all the major figures in the tradition. The answer we will entertain here is that it is possible to find a standard within our own activities that determines whether they are being performed well or poorly. This is what existentialists refer to as authenticity . 7

Mr. Green, knowing that he has terminal lung cancer, can arrange the final years of his life in a variety of ways; it is up to him how he will structure his remaining time. But there are two ways in which he can choose:

(i) he can see his choices as simply thrust upon him by the world—i.e., he can believe that he really doesn’t have a choice at all,

(ii) he can see his choices as his own while taking full responsibility for them.

Only by acting in this way is Mr. Green acting authentically , since it is only under these conditions that he is true to himself. Acting inauthentically , then, involves excusing oneself from responsibility by ignoring one’s freedom. The existentialist hopes to have shown that despite the lack of external guidance, we are perfectly capable of telling from within our own activities whether we are acting authentically or inauthentically. 8

4. Conclusions

Existentialism gives us some tools for understanding (i) our essence, and (ii) how it is possible to live a meaningful life.

The ideas defended by existentialists have been thought to have both positive and negative implications for us. On the one hand, our lives are not determined by God, society, or contingent circumstances; on the other hand, absolute freedom can be a burden. As Sartre puts it, “man is condemned to be free.” 9 That is, it was never up to us to be free, and we cannot cease to be free. Since we must be free, and because freedom entails responsibility, we can never opt out of being responsible. Thus we are simultaneously unencumbered and encumbered by our freedom to choose who we will be.

1 This is not to denigrate the lives of things radically different from us, but merely to point out that paradigm human creatures live peculiar sorts of lives. The demarcating line here between lives like ours and lives unlike ours needn’t be drawn along purely biological lines. There are potentially things—certain non-human animals, futuristic artificially intelligent systems—that have lives like ours, and whose lives are properly studied by Existentialism. Similarly, there are some biological humans—the very young, the severely mentally handicapped—whose lives are not like ours , and hence, whose lives are not properly studied by Existentialism.

2 Existential themes can be traced as far back as St. Augustine in his Confessions . Most philosophers today agree, however, that 19 th- Century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and 19th-Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did much to provide the framework for what Existentialism would become in its more definitive era. The major figures of Existentialism include not only Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but also (perhaps more importantly) Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, in the 20 th century.

3 What Plato calls “forms.”

4 This is an expression of what Heidegger calls the They-self, Being and Time S ection 129

5 Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (20)

6 There is some debate about whether Existentialism is actually a moral theory. One reason for the doubt is precisely this one – that there is nothing action-guiding about Existentialism.

7 Steven Crowell makes this point in his SEP article when discussing Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘ruling instinct.’

8 There is a serious worry here that must be addressed by the existentialist, and I will leave it as an exercise for the reader. While it seems better to act authentically than to act inauthentically, don’t we need to meet even more standards in order to count as living a truly good life? In other words, we might worry about whether authenticity is the only guiding principle that we really need. Perhaps it is possible to be an authentic genocidal dictator. If so, then perhaps Existentialism does not, on its own, suffice as a moral theory.

9 Sartre, op. cit . (29)

Crowell, Steven. “Existentialism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Stanford University, 23 Aug. 2004. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . Trans. John Macquarrie. Ed. Edward Robinson. New York: HarperPerennial/Modern Thought, 2008.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism . Ed. John Kulka and Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.

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Addison Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The American University in Cairo. His interests include Kant and Post-Kantian European Philosophy, with special attention to the topics of self-consciousness, ontology, and cognitive capacities and attitudes. philpeople.org/profiles/addison-ellis

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Essays In Existentialism Paperback – June 1, 2000

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Existentialist Movement in Literature

Existentialist Movement in Literature

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 29, 2016 • ( 8 )

Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd , notably in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which two men divert themselves while they wait expectantly for someone (or something) named Godot who never arrives. They claim Godot to be an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting they would not recognize him if they saw him. To occupy themselves they eat, sleep, talk, argue, sing, play games, exercise swap hats, and contemplate suicide—anything “to hold the terrible silence at bay.” The play “exploits several archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos.” The play also illustrates an attitude toward man’s experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can only be reconciled in mind and art of the absurdist. The play examines questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence.

Franz Kafka ‘s works, in which themes of alienation and persecution are repeatedly emphasized, permeate the apparent hopelessness•and absurdity that are considered emblematic of existentialism. The Metamorphosis resonates the alienation and revulsion of Gregor Samsa , who gets transformed into a monstrous insect and is hopelessly abandoned and hated by his family. The Trial, in which Josef K. is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. The agents do not name the authority for which they are acting. He is not taken away, however, but left at home to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs. On the last day of K.’s thirtieth year, two men arrive to execute him. He offers little resistance, suggesting that he has realised this as being inevitable for some time. They lead him to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself, but he cannot: The two men then execute him. His last words describe his own death: “Like a doggy” The Castle — in which the protagonist, K., struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village for unknown reasons. The novel is about alienation bureaucracy, the seemingly endless frustrations of man’s attempts to stand against the system, and the futile and hopeless pursuit of an unobtainable goal.

Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (which introduces his theory of the absurd) presents Sisyphus’s ceaseless and pointless toil as a metaphor for modern lives spent working at futile jobs in factories and offices. Sisyphus represents an absurd hero who lives life to the fullest, hates death and is condemned to a meaningless task. Camus saw absurdity as the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither, which he expressed in works like The Stranger and The Plague, which often pointedly resonate as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition. Camus emphasizes the ideas that we ultimately have no control, irrationality of life is inevitable, and he further illustrates the human reaction towards the “absurd.” He questions the meaning of the moral concepts justifying humanity and human suffering. The plague, which befalls Oran, ultimately, enables people to understand that their individual suffering is meaningless. As the epidemic “evolves” within the seasons, so do the citizens of Oran, who instead of willfully giving up to a disease they have no control over, decide to fight against their impending death, thus unwillingly creating optimism in the midst of hopelessness.

Tom Stoppard ‘s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist tragicomedy and palimpsest, which expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare ‘s Hamlet . Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, for the presence or two central characters who almost appear to be two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time. The two characters are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding. They stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the , implications, and muse on the irrationality and randomness of the world.

Jean Anouilh ‘s Antigone also presents arguments founded on existentialist ideas. It is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name ( Antigone, by Sophocles ) from the 5th century BC. Produced under Nazi censorship, the play is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority (represented by Antigone) and the acceptance of it (represented by Creon ), Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but without affirmatively choosing a noble death. The play discusses the nature of power, fate and choice, the “promise of a humdrum of happiness” and of a mediocre existence.

Critic Martin Esslin in the book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene lonesco , Jean Genet , and Arthur Adamov wove into their plays the existentialist belief that we are absurd beings lost in a universe empty of real meaning. Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than did the plays by Sartre and Camus . Though most of such playwrights, subsequently labeled “Absurdist” (based on Esslin’s book), denied affiliations with existentialism and were often staunchly anti-philosophical (for example, lonesco often claimed he identified more with “ Pataphysics ” or with Surrealism than with Existentialism ), the playwrights are often linked to Existentialism based on Esslin’s observation.

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Existentialism

As an intellectual movement that exploded on the scene in mid-twentieth-century France, “existentialism” is often viewed as a historically situated event that emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which created the circumstances for what has been called “the existentialist moment” (Baert 2015), where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness. Although the most popular voices of this movement were French, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as compatriots such as Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the conceptual groundwork of the movement was laid much earlier in the nineteenth century by pioneers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century German philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers as well as prominent Spanish intellectuals José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno. The core ideas have also been illuminated in key literary works. Beyond the plays, short stories, and novels by French luminaries like Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, there were Parisian writers such as Jean Genet and André Gide, the Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the work of Norwegian authors such as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, and the German-language iconoclasts Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. The movement even found expression across the pond in the work of the “lost generation” of American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, mid-century “beat” authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs, and the self-proclaimed “American existentialist,” Norman Mailer (Cotkin 2003, 185).

What distinguishes existentialism from other movements in the intellectual history of the West is how it stretched far beyond the literary and academic worlds. Its ideas are captured in films by Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Goddard, Akira Kurosawa, and Terrence Malick. Its moods are expressed in the paintings of Edvard Munch, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Edward Hopper and in the vitiated forms of the sculptor Alberto Giocometti. Its emphasis on freedom and the struggle for self-creation informed the radical and emancipatory politics of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as well as the writings of Black intellectuals such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Its engagement with the relationship between faith and freedom and the incomprehensibility of God shaped theological debates through the lectures and writings of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, among others. And, with its penetrating analyses of anxiety and the importance of self-realization, the movement has had a profound impact in the development of humanistic and existential approaches to psychotherapy in the work of a wide range of theorists, including R.D. Laing, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, and Irvin Yalom.

With this broad and diverse range of incarnations, it is difficult to explain what the term “existentialism” refers to. The word, first introduced by Marcel in 1943, is certainly not a reference to a coherent system or philosophical school. [ 1 ] Indeed, the major contributors are anything but systematic and have widely divergent views, and of these, only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly self-identified as “existentialists.” In surveying its representative thinkers, one finds secular and religious existentialists, philosophers who embrace a conception of radical freedom and others who reject it. And there are those who regard our relations with others as largely mired in conflict and self-deception and others who recognize a deep capacity for self-less love and interdependence. Given these disparate threads and the fact that there is no unifying doctrine, one can nonetheless distill a set of overlapping ideas that bind the movement together.

Nihilism : The emergence of existentialism as an intellectual movement was influenced by the rise of nihilism in late nineteenth century Europe as the pre-modern religious worldview was replaced with one that was increasingly secular and scientific. This historical transition resulted in the loss of a transcendent moral framework and contributed to the rise of modernity’s signature experiences: anxiety, alienation, boredom, and meaninglessness.
Engagement vs. Detachment : Against a philosophical tradition that privileges the standpoint of theoretical detachment and objectivity, existentialism generally begins in medias res , amidst our own situated, first-person experience. The human condition is revealed through an examination of the ways we concretely engage with the world in our everyday lives and struggle to make sense of and give meaning to our existence.
Existence Precedes Essence : Existentialists forward a novel conception of the self not as a substance or thing with some pre-given nature (or “essence”) but as a situated activity or way of being whereby we are always in the process of making or creating who we are as our life unfolds. This means our essence is not given in advance; we are contingently thrown into existence and are burdened with the task of creating ourselves through our choices and actions.
Freedom : Existentialists agree that what distinguishes our existence from that of other beings is that we are self-conscious and exist for ourselves, which means we are free and responsible for who we are and what we do. This does not mean we are wholly undetermined but, rather, that we are always beyond or more than ourselves because of our capacity to interpret and give meaning to whatever limits or determines us.
Authenticity : Existentialists are critical of our ingrained tendency to conform to the norms and expectations of the public world because it prevents us from being authentic or true to ourselves. An authentic life is one that is willing to break with tradition and social convention and courageously affirm the freedom and contingency of our condition. It is generally understood to refer to a life lived with a sense of urgency and commitment based on the meaning-giving projects that matter to each of us as individuals.
Ethics : Although they reject the idea of moral absolutes and universalizing judgments about right conduct, existentialism should not be dismissed for promoting moral nihilism. For the existentialist, a moral or praiseworthy life is possible. It is one where we acknowledge and own up to our freedom, take full responsibility for our choices, and act in such a way as to help others realize their freedom.

These ideas serve to structure the entry.

1. Nihilism and the Crisis of Modernity

2.1 subjective truth, 2.2 perspectivism, 2.3 being-in-the-world, 2.4 embodiment, 3. existence precedes essence, 4.1 the anxiety of choice, 4.2 mediated freedom, 5.1 the power of moods, 5.2 kierkegaard’s knight of faith, 5.3 nietzsche’s overman, 5.4 heidegger’s resolute dasein, 5.5 self-recovery in sartre and beauvoir, 6.1 authentic being-for-others, 6.2 the ethics of recognition, 6.3 the ethics of engagement, 7.1 post-structuralism, 7.2 narrative and hermeneutic philosophy, 7.3 philosophy of mind and cognitive science, 7.4 critical phenomenology, 7.5 comparative and environmental philosophy, 7.6 philosophy of health and illness, 7.7 a new generation, other internet resources, related entries.

We can find early glimpses of what might be called the “existential attitude” (Solomon 2005) in the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies of antiquity, in the struggle with sin and desire in St. Augustine’s Confessions , in the intimate reflections on death and the meaning of life in Michel de Montaigne’s Essays , and in the confrontation with the “dreadful silence” of the cosmos in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées . But it was not until the nineteenth century that the ideas began to coalesce into a bona fide intellectual movement. By this time, an increasingly secular and scientific worldview was emerging and the traditional religious framework that gave pre-modern life a sense of moral orientation and cohesion was beginning to collapse. Without a north star of moral absolutes to guide us, the modern subject was left abandoned and lost, “wandering,” as Nietzsche writes, “as if through an endless nothing” (1887 [1974], §125). But it wasn’t just the rise of modern science and its cold mechanistic view of the world as a value-less aggregate of objects in causal interaction that contributed to the anxiety and forlornness of the modern age. The rise of Protestantism also played a role. With its rejection of hierarchical Church authority, this new form of Christianity emphasized subjective inwardness and created a unique social configuration grounded in principles of individualism, freedom, and self-reliance. The result was the loss of a sense of community and belongingness rooted in the close-knit social bonds of traditional society. And the Protestant shift intensified the Christian attitude of contemptus mundi (“contempt for the world”), contributing to feelings of loneliness and creating a perception of public life as a domain that was fundamentally inauthentic and corrupt (Aho 2020; Guignon 2004; Taylor 1989).

Along with these historical developments, social transformations associated with the Industrial Revolution and the formation of the modern state were emerging. With newly mechanized working conditions and bureaucratic forms of administration, an increasingly impersonal and alienating social order was established. When Ortega y Gasset introduces his notion of “the mass man,” he captures the automation and lifeless conformism of the machine age, where everybody “feels just like everybody else and is nevertheless not concerned about it” (1930 [1993, 15]). In their conceptions of “the public” (Kierkegaard), “the herd” (Nietzsche), and “the They” (Heidegger), existentialists offer powerful critiques of the leveled down and routinized ways of being that characterize mass society. And the novels and short stories of Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kafka capture the bourgeois emptiness and boredom of the managerial class and the paranoia and distrust that emerges when life is regulated and controlled by faceless bureaucrats.

These social transformations created the conditions for nihilism, where modern humanity suddenly found itself adrift and confused, unsure of which path to take or where to look for a stable and enduring sense of truth and meaning. The condition of nihilism involves the shocking recognition that there is no overarching reason, order, or purpose to our existence, that it is all fundamentally meaningless and absurd. Of all the existentialists, Nietzsche was the most influential and prophetic in diagnosing and conceptualizing the crisis. With the death of God and the loss of moral absolutes, we are exposed to existence “in its most terrible form … without meaning or aim” (Nietzsche 1887 [1974], §55). And it is against this anomic background that the question of existence, of what it means to be, becomes so urgent. But it is a question that requires taking a radically different standpoint than the one privileged by the philosophical tradition.

2. Engagement vs. Detachment

From Plato onward, Western philosophy has generally prioritized a methodology grounded in a perspective of rational detachment and objectivity to arrive at truths that are immutable and timeless. By practicing what Merleau-Ponty disparagingly calls, “high-altitude thinking” (1964 [1968], 73), the philosopher adopts a perspective that is detached and impersonal, a “God’s eye view” or “view from nowhere” uncorrupted by the contingencies of our emotions, our embodiment, or the prejudices of our time and place. In this way the philosopher can grasp the “reality” behind the flux of “appearances,” the essential and timeless nature of things “under the perspective of eternity” ( sub specie aeternitatis ). Existentialism offers a thoroughgoing rejection of this view, arguing that we cannot look down on the human condition from a detached, third-person perspective because we are already thrown into the self-interpreting event or activity of existing, an activity that is always embodied, felt, and historically situated. Existence, then, is generally grasped not just through dispassionate theorizing but through a careful analysis of first-person experience, of the concrete, flesh and blood particulars of everyday life and the feelings, relationships, and commitments that make us who we are. It is a philosophy that begins from the standpoint of the engagé , of the individual who is engaged in life and who confronts the givens of existence.

The existentialist critique of theoretical detachment was pioneered by Kierkegaard whose scorn was directed primarily at G.W. F. Hegel, a philosopher who adopted the “perspective of eternity” to build a metaphysical system that would provide complete knowledge of reality. By taking a disengaged and panoptic view, Kierkegaard argues Hegel’s system invariably covers over the deeply personal project of being human and the specific needs and concerns of the existing individual. In his words, “it makes the subject accidental, and thereby transforms existence into something indifferent, something vanishing” (1846 [1941, 173]). In response, Kierkegaard reverses the traditional orientation that privileges objectivity by claiming that, when it comes to the question of existence, one’s own subjective truth is “ the highest truth attainable ” (1846 [1941, 182]). This means the abstract truths of philosophical detachment are always subordinate to the concrete truths of the existing individual. “The real subject,” writes Kierkegaard, “is not the cognitive subject … the real subject is the ethically existing subject” (1846 [1941, 281]). And subjective truth cannot be reasoned about or explained logically; it emerges out of the situated commitments, affects, and needs of the individual. For this reason, it does not disclose timeless and objective truths; it discloses “a truth which is true for me” (1835 [1959, 44]). For Kierkegaard, to live this truth invariably results in feelings of anxiety and confusion because it is objectively uncertain; it has no rational justification, and no one else can understand or relate to it. It is an ineffable truth that is felt rather than known. In this sense, the existing individual “discovers something that thought cannot think” (Kierkegaard 1844 [1936, 29]). But prioritizing the contingent and unrationalizable truths of existence does not mean Kierkegaard is forwarding a position of “irrationalism.” He is claiming, rather, that the standpoint of rational detachment cannot help us access the self-defining commitments and projects that matter to the existing individual. Truths of flesh and blood cannot be reduced to systematic explanation because such truths do not provide us with objective knowledge. Rather, they lay bare the passionate and urgent sense of how we should live our lives. They tell the individual: “what I am to do , not what I am to know” (Kierkegaard, 1835 [1959, 44]).

Nietzsche echoes Kierkegaard’s misgivings about methodological detachment and philosophical systems but he does so by forwarding a pragmatic and perspectival account of truth. He argues that philosophers don’t discover objective truths by means of detached reasoning because truth claims are always shaped by and embedded in specific sociohistorical contexts. Truths, for Nietzsche, are best understood as social constructs; they are created or invented by a historical people, and they endure only so long as they are socially useful. On Nietzsche’s account, truths are passed down historically for generations to the point where they are uncritically accepted as “facts.” But from the standpoint of perspectivism, “facts are precisely what there is not, [there are] only interpretations. [The world] has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings” (Nietzsche 1901 [1968], §481). Nietzsche’s genealogy is one that shows how the history of Western philosophy is largely a history of forgetting how truths are invented. “It is only by means of forgetfulness,” he writes, “that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a ‘truth’” (Nietzsche 1889a [1990a], §93). This means human beings are already bound up in socially constructed perspectives that they cannot disengage or detach from. To exist, then, is to live in one’s “own perspectival forms, and only in them. We cannot see around our own corner” (Nietzsche 1887 [1974], §374). There is no aperspectival “reality.” The epistemological distinction between “appearance” and “reality” is a pseudo-problem that is always parasitic on the perspectival forms that we inhabit.

Nietzsche goes on to suggest there is a psychological motivation in our shared belief in objective truth. It shelters us from the terrifying contingency and mutability of existence. Nietzsche understands that human beings are vulnerable and frightened creatures, and the belief in truth—even though it is an illusion—has social and pragmatic utility by providing a measure of coherence and reliability. We need these truths for psychological protection, to help us cope with an otherwise chaotic and precarious existence. “Truth,” therefore, “is that sort of error without which a certain species of life could not live” (Nietzsche 1901 [1968], §493).

In Being and Time , Heidegger will expand on this critique of detachment and objectivity by developing his own phenomenological analysis of existence or “being-in-the-world” ( In-der-Welt-sein ). Following the core maxim of phenomenology introduced by his teacher Husserl, Heidegger’s philosophy attempts to return “to the things themselves,” to not explain but describe how things are given, reveal themselves, and make sense to us in our average everyday lives. Employing the word “Dasein,” a colloquial German term that refers to the kind of “existence” or “being” unique to humans, Heidegger makes it clear he is not interested in a systematic explanation of what we are , as if existence referred to the objective presence of a substance—e.g., a rational animal, an ego cogito , or an ensouled body. As a phenomenologist, he is concerned with how we are . In his version of phenomenology, Dasein is viewed not as a substance with what-like characteristics but as a self-interpreting, meaning-giving activity. Dasein refers to “the subject’s way of being ” (Heidegger 1927 [1982, 123]), someone who is always already involved and engaged with the equipment, institutions, and practices of a shared world and that embodies a tacit understanding of how to be in that world.

Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world articulates three related ideas that will become central to twentieth-century existentialism and phenomenology. First, it offers a thoroughgoing rejection of the Cartesian view of the self or “I” as a discrete mental container of “inner” thoughts and beliefs that is somehow separate and distinct from “outer” objects in the world. There is no inner-outer dualism because the self is not a disembodied mind or consciousness. It is the activity of existing, a relational activity that is structurally bound up in the world. Thus, “self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein” (Heidegger 1927 [1982, 297]). Second, Heidegger compels us to rethink what we mean by “world.” From a phenomenological perspective, the world is not a geometrical space nor is it the sum of objects. It is the relational setting of our lives, the shared context of meaning that we are already involved in. And our involvement in the world allows objects to count and matter to us in particular ways. Third, Heidegger suggests that being-in-the-world is a meaning-giving activity. When we engage with and handle objects in the world, we give them meaning; we encounter them as meaningful . What appears to us in the immediacy of lived experience is always shaped by the public meanings we grow into. The fact that our existence is “fraught with meaning” suggests that experience has an intentional structure; it is always directed towards objects; it is about or of something (Heidegger 1919 [2002, 60]). The experience of hearing, for example, is not a representation of bare sense data because sounds are invariably colored by the context of meaning we are thrown into. We hear some- thing : we hear “the thunder of the heavens, the rustling of the woods, the rumbling of the motors, the noises of the city” (Heidegger 1950 [1971, 65], emphasis added). Meaning, on this view, is not generated by detached cognitive associations. It emerges against the background of our functional involvement in the world, in the way we are situated and engaged in a shared network of equipment, roles, institutions, and projects. And this engagement reveals a kind of pre-reflective competence or practical “know how” ( können ) that can never be made theoretically explicit.

We see, then, that in their critique of third-person detachment existentialists forward the idea that we are already “caught up in the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 [1962, 5]). And an essential aspect of being caught up in this way is the experience of one’s own embodiment and the crucial role that bodily orientation, affectivity, perception, and motility play in our everyday being-in-the-world. In this way, philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Marcel challenge the traditional interpretation of the body. Against the standard “Cartesian account,” the body is not regarded as a discrete, causally determined object, extended in space, and set apart from the disinterested gaze of the cognizing mind. The body is not something I have. It is a site of affectivity and meaning. It is who I am . And I cannot obtain objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it; it is the experiential medium of my existence. “The body,” as Sartre puts it, “is lived and not known .” (1943 [1956, 427]) [ 2 ]

By building on the analysis of the lived body ( corps propre , corps vécu , corps vivant , Leib ), existentialists reveal how our moods, perceptions, and experiences are already bound up in worldly meanings, how we internalize these meanings, and how this act of internalization shapes the way we live, how we handle the tools of daily life, maneuver through lived space, relate to others, and interpret and perform our identities. In her pathbreaking work The Second Sex , Beauvoir illuminates this point by showing how a woman tends to internalize the dominant androcentric worldview, resulting in a representation of herself as subordinate, weak, and inferior. She is the “second sex” not because she is born with a particular biological body, but because she inhabits, enacts, and embodies the oppressive meanings and practices unique to her patriarchal situation. As Beauvoir famously puts it, the woman “is not born , but rather becomes a woman.” This is because “the body is not a thing; it is a situation… subject to taboos [and] laws… It is a reference to certain values from which [she] evaluates [herself]” (1949 [1952, 34, 36]).

The existentialist’s distinction between the object-body and the lived-body has made it possible for contemporary philosophers and social theorists to engage the lived experience of those who have been historically marginalized by the western tradition. By rejecting the standpoint of theoretical detachment and focusing on the structures of embodiment and being-in-the-world, influential thinkers such as Franz Fanon (1952 [1967]), Iris Marion Young (1984 [2000]), and Judith Butler (1990), among others, have explored different ways in which we enact and embody forms of oppression and how this can shape our self-image and inhibit the experience of movement, spatial orientation, and other forms of bodily comportment. These investigations help to broaden and pluralize our understanding of the human condition by shedding light on a diverse range of embodied perspectives, from ethnicity and race, sex and gender, and age and physical ability. And insofar as these analyses help capture what is distinct about the meaning-giving activity of humans, they illuminate what is arguably the unifying principle of existentialism: “existence precedes essence.”

This principle was initially introduced early on in Heidegger’s Being and Time when he writes, “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (1927 [1962, 42]). [ 3 ] Sartre will later repackage this line with the pithy adage, “existence precedes essence” (1946 [2001, 292]). What this statement suggests is that there is no pre-given or essential nature that determines us, which means that we are always other than ourselves, that we don’t fully coincide with who we are. We exist for ourselves as self-making or self-defining beings, and we are always in the process of making or defining ourselves through the situated choices we make as our lives unfold. This is, according to Sartre, “the first principle of existentialism,” and it “means, first, that man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself” (1946 [2001, 292–3]). The point here is that there can be no complete or definitive account of being human because there is nothing that grounds or secures our existence. Existence is fundamentally unsettled and incomplete because we are always projecting forward into possibilities, “hurling ourselves toward a future” as we imagine and re-imagine who we will be. Existence, then, is not a static thing; it is a dynamic process of self-making.

Acknowledging existence as a self-making process does not mean the existentialist is denying that there are determinate aspects or “facts” about our situation that limit and constrain us. This is our givenness (or “facticity”), and it includes aspects of our being such as our embodiment and spatiality, our creaturely appetites and desires, and the socio-historical context we find ourselves in. But what distinguishes us as humans is that we have the capacity to rise above or “transcend” these facts in the way we relate to, interpret, and make sense of them. If I am compelled by a strong desire for sex, alcohol, or cigarettes, for instance, I do not out of necessity have to act on these desires. I have the freedom to question them and give them meaning, and the meanings I attribute to them shape my choices and the direction my life will take going forward.

This means, unlike other organisms, we are self-conscious beings who can surpass our facticity by calling it into question, interpreting it in different ways, and making decisions about how to deal with it in the future. This is what Kierkegaard means when he describes existence as “a relation that relates to itself” (1849 [1989, 43]). Existence is a reflexive or relational tension between “facticity” and “transcendence,” where we are constrained by our facticity but simultaneously endowed with the freedom to exceed or transcend it. The human being is, as Ortega y Gasset writes, “a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it” (1941, 111). We are not wholly determined by our nature because our nature is always a question or an issue for us. We have the capacity to reflect on and care about it. And the way we care about our nature informs how we create ourselves. Sartre will go so far as to say that human existence is fundamentally “indefinable” and that “there is no human nature” because there is no aspect of our facticity that can fully describe us. Our facticity reveals itself to us only through the self-defining meanings and values that we give to it. “If man […] is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing . Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be” (1946 [2001, 293]). This idea that facticity can always be nullified or negated by our choices reveals the key to understanding the existentialist conception of freedom.

Recognizing that there is no pre-given essence that determines existence, the existentialist makes it clear that it is up to the individual to make his, her, or their own identity through choices and actions. Sartre explains that the coward, for instance, is not the way he is because of an unstable childhood or a particular genetic makeup. The coward “makes himself a coward” by means of his decisions (1946 [2001, 301]). In this way, the existentialist generally affirms the view that the human being has free will, is able to make decisions, and can be held responsible for their actions. [ 4 ] But, as we will see, this does not mean that we can do whatever we want. It means, rather, that existence is structured by our capacity to give meaning to our situation based on the actions and choices we make as our lives unfold. Insofar as we exist, we are envisioning a certain kind of life, assigning a value to our identity, and making ourselves into the kind of person we are.

When we become aware of our freedom as an inescapable given of the human condition, the awareness is often accompanied by anxiety because we realize that we alone are responsible for our choices and the projects we undertake. There is no moral absolute, divine will, or natural law that can provide guidance or justify our actions. We are, in this sense, condemned to be free because “there are no excuses behind us nor justifications before us” (Sartre 1946 [2001, 296]).

In the canon of existentialist literature, no writer captures this idea better than Dostoevsky in his Notes from the Underground . The nameless “underground man” rebels against an increasingly scientized, rational, and mechanistic picture of human behavior promoted by Russian social reformers in the 1860s, where everything a person does was thought to be determined by causal laws. For the underground man, this view reduces the human being to a mechanical cog or “a piano key” (1864 [2009, 18]), and it undermines the one value that gives existence its meaning and dignity, that is, the capacity to choose and create our own lives. [ 5 ] To affirm his freedom, the underground man responds to this situation through self-immolating acts of revolt, doing the opposite of whatever the determinations of rationality, social convention, or the laws of nature demand. When he has a toothache, he refuses to see the doctor; when he is at a party with former school mates, he behaves in outrageous and humiliating ways; when the prostitute Liza reaches out to him in tenderness, he lashes out at her in rage. In this sense, the underground man is an anti-hero. He recognizes that freedom is the highest value, the “most advantageous advantage” (1864 [2009, 17]) for human beings, but at the same time he realizes there is no way of knowing what might come of our choices; they may, as they do for the underground man, result in our own self-destruction. As Dostoevsky writes: “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And the choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice” (1864 [2009, 20]).

This account of freedom suggests that my being (or identity) is always penetrated by the possibility of its own negation because I can always question myself and assign new meanings to and interpretations of who I am in the future. My self-interpretation is always insecure or unstable. I may interpret myself as a philosophy professor today, but I am also not a professor insofar as I can freely choose to reject this identity and resign from my job tomorrow. In this sense, I am no-thing, a “being-possible.” As Sartre puts it: “human existence is constituted as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is ” (1943 [1956, 107]). For the existentialist, anxiety discloses this predicament to me, revealing that I’ve been abandoned to a realm of possibilities, where I face a dizzying array of options, and I alone am answerable to whatever options I choose. Understood this way, anxiety is not directed at some external object or event in the world. If I am an incarnation of freedom, it is directed at me ; I am the source of it.

In Being and Nothingness , Sartre forwards an account of “radical” or “absolute” freedom, an unconditioned “freedom-in-consciousness” where we make or create ourselves ex nihilo , through the sheer “upsurge” of choice alone. But in the wake of Marxist criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, his views changed; he realized that this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced by Cartesian assumptions. [ 6 ] It failed to engage the social, historical, and material conditions that invariably limit and constrain our freedom. He came to recognize that our choices and actions are always mediated by the world, by the sociohistorical situation we’ve been thrown into. He sees that the idea of radical, unconditioned freedom “is nonsense. The truth is that existence ‘is-in-society’ as it ‘is-in-the-world’” (Sartre 1952 [1963, 590]). Freedom must be understood as “freedom-in-situation.” It is true that we are free to create ourselves, but it is also true that we are already created by our situation. “Man,” is best understood as “a totally conditioned social being who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him” (Sartre 1972 [2008, 35]).

Sartre’s Marxist inspired conception of situated or mediated freedom is one that had already been forwarded and developed by Beauvoir in her major treatises The Second Sex and The Coming of Age and in her novels such as The Blood of Others (1945 [1970]) and The Mandarins (1954 [1991]). The view is also developed by her compatriot Merleau-Ponty. In Phenomenology of Perception , for example, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of nothing. They are already embedded in a sociohistorical situation “before any personal decision has been made.” (1945 [1962, 449]) The ways in which we create or make ourselves, then, are always circumscribed by the meanings of our situation. We are simultaneously self-making and already made. “We exist in both ways at once,” writes Merleau-Ponty. “We choose the world, and the world chooses us.” (1945 [1962, 453–454]). As we will see in section 6.3, the recognition of the extent to which freedom is mediated by the material conditions of our situation opened existentialism to a broader engagement with the social sphere and the structures of oppression and violence that shape our experience and self-understanding.

5. Authenticity

Existentialism is well known for its critique of mass society and our tendency to conform to the levelled-down norms and expectations of the public. Rather than living our own lives, we tend to get pulled along by the crowd, doing what “they” do. As Heidegger writes, “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure. We read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge … we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The ‘they’… prescribes the kind of being of everydayness” (1927 [1962, 126–7]). Living this way can be comforting, creating the illusion that we are living well because we are doing what everyone else does. But for the existentialist, this conformist way of being is a manifestation of inauthenticity or self-deception because it shows how we are unwilling or unable to face up to the freedom and contingency of our condition; it reveals the extent to which we are afraid of being an individual, of being true to ourselves, and of making our own life-defining choices.

In The Sickness unto Death , Kierkegaard describes inauthenticity in terms of fleeing from ourselves, of “not wanting to be oneself, [of] wanting to be rid of oneself” (1849 [1989, 43]). Insofar as we let others decide our lives for us, we live a life that is bereft of passion, a life of “bloodless indolence,” where we are unwilling or unable to “make a real commitment.” (Kierkegaard 1846 [1946, 266–67]). Similarly, Heidegger will refer to this condition as a form of estrangement that “alienates Dasein from itself,” where we exist as a “they-self” ( Man-selbst ) that drifts along in lockstep with others. (1927 [1962, 254–55]) And this self-estrangement is numbing or “tranquilizing” ( beruhigend ) because it covers over the anxiety of own freedom and finitude.

Sartre and Beauvoir refer to inauthenticity in terms of “bad faith” ( mauvaise foi ), where we either deny or over-identify with one of the two aspects of human existence, either facticity or transcendence. I am in bad faith, for example, when I over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation. Sartre and Beauvoir recognize that the self is never wholly free or wholly determined; it is structurally unstable, it is a “double- property … that is at once a facticity and a transcendence” (Sartre 1943 [1956, 98]). When we cling to one or the other of these poles, we are denying this “double-property,” and this is a denial of the fundamental ambiguity and instability at the core of the human condition.

For the existentialists, the possibility of breaking free from engrained patterns of self-deception is generally not something that is accomplished by means of detached reflection. It emerges in the wake of powerful emotional experiences or moods. When the existentialist refers to feelings of “nausea” (Sartre), “absurdity” (Camus), “anxiety” (Kierkegaard), “guilt” (Heidegger), or “mystery” (Marcel) they are describing uncanny affects that have the power to shake us out of our complacency, where the secure and familiar world breaks apart and collapses, and we are forced to confront the question of existence. Jaspers refers to these moments as “limit” or “boundary situations” ( Grenzsituationen )—situations “when everything that is said to be valuable and true collapses before our eyes” (1932 [1956, 117]).

Although terrifying, the existentialist makes it clear that we should not close our eyes or flee from these experiences because they are structural to the human condition. They are, as Jaspers puts it, “impassable, unchangeable situations that belong to human existence as such” (1913 [1997, 330]). Instead of turning away from this basic anxiety, the existentialist asks us to turn toward and face it, because it is amidst a collapsing world that the ultimate questions emerge: Who am I? and What now? In this way, the existentialist sees the experience of anxiety and its related moods as an opportunity for personal growth and transformation. World-shattering moods open me up to the possibility of being authentic, of accepting and affirming the unsettling givens of my condition, of being released from distractions and trivialities, and of recognizing the self-defining projects that matter to me as an individual.

For Kierkegaard, the authentic individual is someone that is “willing to be one’s own self.” (1843 [1989, 43]) He, she, or they recognize(s) that there is more to life than following the crowd or chasing surface pleasures. Such a life is invariably scattered and disjointed, pulled apart by temporal desires and the fleeting fads and fashions of the public. Authenticity requires a passionate, “personality defining” ( personligheds definerende ) decision or commitment that binds together and unifies the fragmented and disjointed moments of our life into a focused and coherent whole. The “unifying power” of commitment is embodied in, what Kierkegaard calls, an attitude of “earnestness” ( alvor ), a sober recognition that existence is a serious affair, not a pleasure-seeking masquerade. But authenticity cannot be achieved simply by means of renouncing temporal pleasures and doing one’s duty according to some universal moral principle—such as the Ten Commandments or Kant’s Categorical Imperative. This is because, for Kierkegaard, the subjective truth of the individual is higher than the universal truths of morality. And this means there may be times in our lives where we must suspend our obligation to the ethical sphere and accept the terrible fact that it may be more important to be authentic (to be true to oneself) than it is to be moral (to do what is right.)

In Fear and Trembling , Kierkegaard draws on the biblical figure of Abraham to make this point. As a father, Abraham has a moral duty to love and protect his son, but when God demands that he break this commandment and kill Isaac, he is confronted with a personal truth that is higher than the universal. In committing himself to this truth, Abraham becomes a “knight of faith” by “leaping” ( springer ) into a paradox, one where the truth of “the singular individual is higher than the universal” (1843 [1985, 84]). As a religious existentialist, Kierkegaard contends that this is what is required to enter the sphere of faith and become a Christian. It has nothing to do with membership in a congregation or obedience to doctrinal statements. It is, rather, a willingness to commit to a truth that is fundamentally irrational and absurd. How, for example, can one make rational sense of God’s command to Abraham to kill his own son? “The problem,” writes Kierkegaard, “is not to understand Christianity, but to understand that it cannot be understood” (1835–1854 [1959, 146]). [ 7 ] An authentic or religious life, then, is always accompanied by anxiety and loneliness because the leap individualizes us; it cuts us off from the comforting truths of the public and its blanket conceptions of right and wrong. It compels us to follow a path that no one else may understand. Abraham’s decision is, for this reason, fraught with despair. In his willingness to suspend his moral duty, he appears “insane” because he “cannot make himself understood to anyone.” (1985 (1843], 103)

But with the despair of faith comes feelings of intensity, even joy, as we recognize the absurdity of religious existence, that the eternal or divine is not found in some otherworldly realm, it is bound up in the temporal; that it is this life , the finite, that has infinite significance. Freed from the temptations of the crowd and of blind obedience to moral principles, the knight of faith “takes delight in everything he sees” because he is now fully aware of the majesty and richness of finitude. For him, “finitude tastes just as good as to one who has never known anything higher” (1843 [1985, 69–70]).

Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche is critical of our tendency to follow the herd and cling to universal moral principles. He forwards a conception of authenticity that accepts our nihilistic predicament and rises above Christian values of good and evil. He sees these values as representative of a tame and submissive way of being, a “slave morality” ( Sklavenmoral ) that is subservient to authority and bereft of any originality or style. Nietzsche contrasts this with a “master morality” ( Herrenmoral ) embodied in those who have the courage to face, even affirm, the cruel and tragic aspects of life and the self-directed power to create their own meanings and values against the backdrop of God’s death. Nietzsche refers to the individual who can overcome the meek and slavish values of tradition for the sake of self-creation as an “Overman” ( Übermensch ), an aristocratic figure who embodies the freedom, courage, and strength to be original, that is, to “give style” to life. “Such spirits,” writes Nietzsche, “are always out of fashion or explain themselves and their surroundings as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, and surprising” (1887 [1974], §290).

The key to living with style is, for Nietzsche, a radical acceptance of one’s existence and the world as it is , embracing all our strengths and weaknesses and all the blessed and cursed events that have been and will be. The Overman is a “yes-sayer” who affirms every aspect of his life, “every truth, even the simple, bitter, ugly, unchristian, immoral truths” (1887 [1996], §1). In The Gay Science , Nietzsche captures this attitude with a famous thought experiment called the “doctrine of eternal recurrence.” Here, he asks if we have the audacity to live the same life we are living now over and over for eternity. “And there will be nothing new about it,” he explains, “but every pain and every pleasure, and every thought and sigh, and everything unspeakably small and great in your life must come back to you and all in the same series and sequence.” On Nietzsche’s view, most of us would recoil in horror at the prospect of eternally suffering through the same boredom, failures, and disappointments. But overflowing with amor fati (love of one’s fate), the Overman welcomes this possibility, proclaiming, “I have never heard anything more godlike” (1887 [1974], §341). Camus describes this attitude as a form of rebellion against servile and conformist ways of being. Like the Overman, “the rebel” is someone “born of abundance and fullness of spirit,” and he embodies “the unreserved affirmation of human imperfection and suffering, of evil and murder, of all that is problematic and strange in our existence. It is born of an arrested wish to be what one is in a world that is what it is” (1951 [1956, 72]).

But not everyone has the inborn power to rebel against tradition and creatively express their unique style of living. For Nietzsche, only “the highest types” can manifest this kind of freedom and capacity for self-overcoming. To this end, his account of authenticity is unapologetically elitist and anti-democratic. Most of us are too mired in self-deception, too frightened and weak to break with the herd and become who we are. “Only a very few people can be free,” writes Nietzsche, “It is a prerogative of the strong” (1886 [1998], §29).

Heidegger devotes much of the second half of Being and Time to an analysis of authenticity, employing the German term Eigentlichkeit —formed from the stem of the adjective eigen (“own” or “property”)—that literally means “being own’s own” or “ownnness.” But he sets up his analysis of authenticity by first claiming that self-deception or “inauthenticity” is unavoidable; it is a structure of the human condition, one that he refers to as “falling” ( Verfallen ). What this means is that in our everyday lives we invariably conform (or “fall prey”) to the norms and values of the public world. This results in a kind of complacency and indifference about the question of existence, where we are not our own selves, where “everyone is the other, and no one is himself” (1927 [1962, 128]). Falling creates the illusion that our existence (or being-in-the-world) is secure and thing-like because we are doing what everyone else does. But, for Heidegger, there is nothing that fundamentally secures our existence. As a self-making activity, I am not a stable thing. I am nothing, a “not yet” ( noch nicht ) that is always unsettled, always in the process of making myself. The awareness of our own unsettledness emerges in moments of anxiety when the familiar and routinized world “collapses into itself” (1927 [1962, 186]), and I “die” ( sterben ) because I am no longer able-to-be, that is, to understand or make sense of who I am. [ 8 ]

Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger interprets anxiety as an individualizing mood, one that momentarily “snatches one back” from the tranquilizing routines of “the They,” leaving us vulnerable and exposed to confront our lives (1927 [1962, 384]). And this is potentially liberating because it can temporarily free us from patterns of self-deception, providing insight, a “moment of vision” ( Augenblick ) that can give our lives a renewed sense of urgency and focus. But this experience of individuation does not detach me from the world, turning me into a radical subject or “free floating ‘I’” (1927 [1962, 298]). Heidegger claims that our self-defining choices are always guided in advance by our historical embeddedness, what he calls “historicity” ( Geschichtlichkeit ). The meanings we choose to give to our lives, then, are not created out of thin air; they have already been interpreted and made intelligible by a historical community or “people” ( Volk ). [ 9 ] The moment of vision shakes me out of my fallen, everyday existence and allows me to come back to my historical world with fresh eyes, to seize hold of the publicly interpreted meanings that matter to me and make them “mine” ( Jemeinig ).

Heidegger refers to this authentic attitude in terms of “resoluteness” ( Entschlossenheit ), where I “pull [myself] together,” giving life a sense of cohesion and focus that was missing when I was lost and scattered in “the They.” But being resolute does not mean that I stubbornly cling to whatever possibilities I happen to choose. For Heidegger, authenticity demands an openness and flexibility with how I interpret myself. [ 10 ] Understanding that existence is a situated process of self-making, whatever values or meanings I commit myself to, I must also be willing to let go or give up on them depending on the circumstances of my life, that is, to “hold [myself] free for the possibility of taking it back ” (1927 [1962, 308]). Resoluteness, on this view, does not mean “becoming rigid” and holding fast to a chosen identity because my self-understanding is always insecure; it can die at any time. For this reason, authenticity requires “readiness” or “anticipation” ( Vorgriff ), where we passionately hold ourselves open and free for the inescapable breakdowns and emergencies of life. It is, in Heidegger’s words, “an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the ‘They’” (1927 [1962, 266]).

Sartre and Beauvoir follow Heidegger in viewing self-deception as structural to the human condition. It is, as Sartre writes, “an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being” (1943 [1956, 116]). Although I can certainly deceive myself by over-identifying with freedom and denying the extent to which my possibilities are constrained by facticity, the most common and familiar form of bad faith is when I over-identify with my facticity, as if I were a fully realized object or thing, a being “in-itself” ( en-soi ). This form of self-deception is understandable as it creates the consoling impression that there is something secure and thing-like about my identity, that “I am what I am,” and there is nothing that can change me. But to live this way is to deny my freedom and transcendence, that I am self-making, that I live for myself —or, in the vernacular of Sartre and Beauvoir, “for-itself” ( pour-soi ). Human beings are, on their view, always in the process of making or constituting themselves, modifying and negating their being through moment-to-moment choices and actions. This means my identity is never fixed or stable because I can always choose to take a new path or interpret myself in other ways. Regardless of how I see myself at a given time—as a professor, a father, or a political activist—I am also “not” that person, because my identity is never realized and complete; I am always free to negate a given identity and define myself differently in the future. This means I am “what I am not ” (1943 [1956, 103]). And this situation appears to undermine the prospect of authenticity altogether. If the self is always unstable, always in question, how can I ever be genuine or true to myself?

In Being and Nothingness , Sartre provides an answer, referring to authenticity in terms of a “recovery” ( récupération ) of a self or way of being “that was previously corrupted” (1943 [1956, 116]). [ 11 ] But this act of “self-recovery” has nothing to do with creating or holding on to a particular identity. It involves, rather, a clear-eyed awareness and acceptance of the instability and ambiguity of the human condition. And, along with this acceptance, a willingness to act in the face of this ambiguity and to take responsibility, however horrible, for wherever these actions might lead. As Sartre writes, “authenticity consists in a lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it […] sometimes with horror and hate” (1946 [1948, 90]). But just because existence is fundamentally ambiguous does not mean that our chosen projects are meaningless or absurd. My projects have meaning and value because I chose these projects, but the meaning is contingent; it is never enduring or stable. In The Ethics of Ambiguity , Beauvoir explains: “The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed” (1947 [1948, 129]). The point of authenticity, then, is not to be concerned with who I am —because, at bottom, I am nothing. It is to be concerned with what I do . As Sartre writes, “Authenticity reveals that the only meaningful project is that of doing (not that of being)” (1948 [1992, 475]). For Sartre and Beauvoir, to be authentic is to recover and accept the ambiguous tension of the self, that: we are who we are not —and— we are not who are . And by means of this recovery, recognize that the task of existence involves acting and doing, that is, realizing our freedom through projects in the world but also, as we will see, taking responsibility for how these projects might enhance or diminish freedom for others.

Existentialist ethics generally begins with the idea that there is no external moral order or table of values that exists a priori. “It must be understood,” as Beauvoir writes in The Ethics of Ambiguity , “that the passion in which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful.” But this does not mean that the existentialists are promoting a form of moral nihilism. Beauvoir admits it is true that the human being “has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it cannot justify itself, that it cannot give itself reasons for being that it does not have .” It is human existence itself “which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.” (1947 [1948, 12, 15]). [ 12 ] There is, then, a coherent account of ethical responsibility grounded in freedom, not as a theoretical abstraction but as a concrete expression of transcendence, and the obligation to help others realize their own freedom so that I can realize mine. When I acknowledge that freedom is my essence, I must also acknowledge that it is the essence of others and work, to the best of my ability, to help them realize it. My freedom, then, is not free-floating; it is invariably bound up in the freedom of others. As Sartre puts it: “We want freedom for freedom’s sake and in every particular circumstance. And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that freedom of others depends on ours […] I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom” (1945 [2001, 306]).

Sartre and Beauvoir argue that we generally exist as “a being-for-others” ( un être-pour-autrui ), which is to say that I understand or see myself in the way that I do through “the look” ( le regard ) of the Other. And the look has the power to strip away my freedom and turn me into an object. Human relations, on this account, are best understood as a form of conflict, a dyadic power struggle where I try to assert my freedom and subjectivity by turning the Other into an object, while the Other tries to do the same to me. “While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other,” writes Sartre, “the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me… Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others” (1943 [1956, 475]). This struggle for self-assertion leads to Sartre’s famous claim in his play Huis Clos (No Exit) that “Hell is— other people ” (1944 [1989, 45]).

But the struggle to objectify and possess the Other by stripping them of their freedom is a manifestation of inauthentic being-for-others. There is an authentic counterpart. Beauvoir, for example, explores what it means to develop and cultivate freedom for others with her account of “authentic love” ( l’amour authentique ), describing it as a relationship where we acknowledge and nurture the other’s freedom and transcendence while at the same time resisting the temptations of bad faith, that is, to see the Other as an object or thing to be manipulated and possessed. As a moral stance, authentic being-for-others is a form of reciprocity that involves “the mutual recognition of two freedoms […] [where] neither would give up transcendence [and] neither would be mutilated” (1949 [1952, 667]). In this way authenticity and morality belong together, whereby we have a shared obligation to liberate or free each other so that we can create ourselves and take responsibility for the life we lead. Therefore, as Beauvoir puts it, “to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (1947 [1948, 24]).

Heidegger develops a similar idea in Being and Time with his account of “liberating concern” ( befreiend Fürsorge ), a form of care where the central aim is to free the Other from patterns of self-deception so that they can anxiously face and create their own existence. It is a relational stance that “helps the Other become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it” (1927 [1962, 122]). When we care in this way, we resist the temptation to “leap-in” ( einspringen ) for the Other, as if the Other were a dependent thing or object that needs to be sheltered from the unsettling question of existence. Heidegger refers to this sheltering tendency in terms of a kind of tacit mastery or “domination” ( Beherrschung ) that strips the Other of the anxious responsibility they have for their own life. Instead of leaping-in for the Other and disburdening them of their responsibility, an authentic relation is one that “leaps-ahead” ( vorausspringt ) of the Other, giving them back their anxiety and the freedom to care for and confront their condition. As Heidegger writes, we leap-ahead of the Other, “not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to them authentically as such for the first time” (1927 [1962, 122]). Here, we see the development of an ethical maxim: to act in such a way as to will the realization of your own freedom and the realization of freedom for others.

There is also heterodox current among some religious existentialists, one that suggests that moral demands are placed on us when we recognize ourselves not as voluntaristic subjects—or, in the words of Iris Murdoch, “brave naked wills” (1983, 46) severed from bonds of community and attachment—but as relational beings who are fundamentally bound together in mutual vulnerability. And this recognition may serve as the foundation for an ethics by pulling us out of our everyday self-absorption and awakening us, not to our freedom, but to our essential dependency.

Speaking through the religious elder Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov , Dostoevsky offers a powerful indictment of the “terrible individualism” that he sees as endemic to modernity, where unfettered freedom and self-affirmation have become the highest values. Such a view leads not to self-actualization but to loneliness and despair. The modern man, says Zossima, “is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity […] but this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another” (1879 [1957–80, 279]). Against the vision of the willful subject who makes choices without evaluative limits or constraints, Dostoevsky suggests it is only in recognizing the Other as dependent and vulnerable that we can come to recognize ourselves. True freedom emerges when we release ourselves from the bondage of our own egoistic striving and adopt an attitude of humility and self-sacrifice. The aim is to show that the human being is not an isolated will but a frail and defenseless being that is dependent on the self-less love, compassion, and charity of others. [ 13 ] When we free ourselves from the temptations of individualism in this way, Zossima says a moral demand is placed on us, one where we begin to see that “we are all responsible to all and for all” (1879–80 [1957, 228).

The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber expands on this idea in his masterwork I and Thou . He claims that in our everyday lives we generally relate to others from an instrumental and objectifying standpoint, what he calls the “I-It” ( Ich-Es ) relation, where the other is encountered as a thing (or “it”) to be manipulated and controlled for one’s own use. This relation is comforting because it creates the illusion that we have control of our situation. But there are moments in our lives when this illusion collapses, and we become vulnerable to the other, not as an “it” but as a “you.” In the “I-You” ( Ich-Du ) relation, all the egoistic defenses we rely on to conceal our essential dependency and openness to the Other break down. Buber refers to this as an experience of grace, where the Other is revealed to me as a whole person, defenseless and exposed, and I am revealed in the same way. It is a moment where “two human beings reveal the You to one another” (1923 [1970, 95]). In this way, anxiety isn’t a radically individualizing affair, where the forlorn subject is cut off from the relational world to confront their own freedom. For Buber, exposure to the I-You relation shakes us out of our own egoistic concerns and awakens us to the fact that we are not isolated individuals but beings who are always in living relation with others. With this experience “the barriers of the individual are breached,” and this creates an affective union, a “bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread” (1938 [1965], 201, 207]).

The Nazi occupation of France, his own experience as a prisoner of war, and the attacks on his philosophy from influential Marxist critics, compelled Sartre to shift his focus from the individual to the social. Following the war, he, along with Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, launched the influential journal of social criticism Le Temps Modernes (Modern Times), and Sartre made his aims clear in the first issue, writing: “Our intention is to help effect certain changes in the Society that surrounds us… one is responsible for what one is … Totally committed and totally freed. And yet it is the free man who must be delivered , by enlarging his possibilities of choice” (Sartre 1945 [1988, 264–65]). Here we see existentialists making the connection that for the Other to realize their freedom, philosophy must engage the “bases and structures” that limit and constrain them. This is because these structures are not philosophical abstractions; they “are lived as schematic determinates of the individual’s future” (Sartre 1957 [1968, 94]). Society, here, is viewed not as an aggregate of voluntaristic subjects; it is the mediating background of our lives, and if we are going to create a situation of freedom and “enlarge the possibilities of choice,” we must recognize how this background can be violent and oppressive—especially to historically marginalized and undervalued people—and to act in such a way as to transform it.

Of all the major developers of existentialism, it is unquestionably Beauvoir who offered the most sustained and influential analyses of oppression and of possibilities for emancipation, not only in her feminist masterwork The Second Sex , but in her bleak account of the dehumanization of the elderly in The Coming of Age (1970 [1996]) and her reflections on the experience of Black populations in the Jim Crow South in her memoir America Day by Day (1954 [1999]). In these works, Beauvoir illuminates how socioeconomic and political structures can restrict the human capacity for freedom and transcendence, how they have the power to “freeze” the Other, strip away possibilities for agency and self-creation, and trap them in “immanence.” But in these works, Beauvoir makes it clear that this situation is not a destiny. Human beings have no essential nature; no one is born inferior or submissive. We are constituted intersubjectively by growing into, internalizing, and enacting ready-made structures of oppression. But insofar as these structures are constituted and maintained by the choices and actions of individuals, they are not fixed and static. Like human beings, they too are subject to change. Here we see how the recognition that existence precedes essence moves from the ontological realm to the ethical, it becomes a call to action, to engage and transform the material conditions that limit the possibilities of choice for those who are oppressed and marginalized.

In this way, postwar existentialism began to engage the realities of the social sphere and the painful “isms”—classism, racism, colonialism, sexism, anti-Semitism—haunting the western world. It was a philosophy that had come to recognize, in Sartre’s words, that “the individual interiorizes his social determinations; he interiorizes the relations of production, the family of his childhood, the historical past, the contemporary in institutions, and he then re-exteriorizes these acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them” (1972 [2008, 35]). And insofar as these social determinations are not fixed and timeless but contingent human constructs, they can be resisted and transformed to free others.

7. Contemporary Relevance

Existentialism has had a profound impact on how philosophers conceptualize and understand the human condition, with rich accounts of affectivity and embodiment, facticity (or worldliness), and the ways in which we are constituted intersubjectively. It has opened new paths for philosophy to engage with concrete and acute human problems, from sexuality, race, disability, and old age to broader issues of social and political violence and oppressive relations in general. And the movement continues to thrive in the academy today. Not only is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) flourishing as the second largest philosophical organization in the English-speaking world, with smaller research groups (or “Circles”) devoted to every major figure. There is a cascade of scholarship published every year in leading journals and academic presses that captures the enduring relevance of existentialist thought, including important new work engaging the significance of French existentialism as an ethical theory (Webber 2018), reframing our conceptions of virtue and human flourishing (McMullin 2019), and even addressing current analytic debates in philosophies of life-extension, anti-natalism, and transhumanism (Buben 2022). Indeed, the core ideas and major figures of existentialism are not just alive and well; they are shaping developments in a diverse range of areas across the humanities and social sciences.

The legacy is most clearly present in the European philosophies that proceeded it. Existentialism’s critique of foundationalism and the authority of reason as well as its rejection of universalism, essentialism, and “grand narratives” (or metanarratives) all had a decisive impact on post-structural philosophies in France. Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular served as decisive influences on the project of “de-centering the subject” in Jacques Derrida’s method of deconstruction and in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of power, demonstrating how the subject is not the privileged center or origin of truth and knowledge. The subject is, rather, shaped in advance by sociohistorical structures, an overlapping network of norms and practices, linguistic conventions, and shared meanings, and this shaping takes place in a way that we are never fully conscious of. [ 14 ] The individual, on this view, is more of a placeholder or crossing point in these anonymous structures, where the subject exists as “the inscribed surface of events […] totally imprinted by history” (Foucault 1977, 148). Of course, existentialists reject the idea that this historical imprinting or “decentering” is total or absolute. They are, after all, still committed to the value of freedom and authenticity, but they recognize that freedom is never unconditioned. Beyond the philosophies of Heidegger and Nietzsche, we see this recognition in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of mediated freedom, in Sartre’s postwar account of “freedom-in-situation,” and in what Beauvoir calls “ la force des choses ” (the power of circumstances). The recognition of historicity as an impersonal force that structures our identity had such an impact on Foucault’s work that he once remarked: “My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger” (Foucault 1985, cited in Dreyfus 1995, 9).

In viewing the self not as a substance or thing but as a self-interpreting, meaning-giving activity that is always already bound up in the world, existentialism has also informed key developments in narrative and hermeneutic philosophy. Prominent anglophone philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt (1971), Charles Taylor (1985), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) have drawn on classical existentialism to illuminate how we exist in the meanings and self-interpretations that we create for ourselves. My sense of who I am is constituted by an ongoing process of choosing, pulling together, and consolidating the roles, projects, and meanings that matter to me and that are made available by the sociohistorical situation I find myself in. On this view, the story I create for myself is held together by the narrative unity and cohesion that I give to it. This is what Taylor means when he says that we can only understand or “grasp our lives in a narrative” (1989, 47). And this conception of narrative identity not only offers a response to overly reductive conceptions of the self that are grounded in the substance ontologies of mind and body; it demonstrates an attentiveness to the ambiguous tension of our condition, that our choices are both self-fashioning and socially embedded, that we simultaneously make ourselves and are already made.

Beginning with Hubert Dreyfus’s (1972) groundbreaking critique of Artificial Intelligence (AI), philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have been drawing on existentialist philosophy—especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty—to challenge the overly mentalistic picture of selfhood and agency that modern philosophy inherits from Descartes and Kant and to dismantle traditional representational theories of knowledge. Key works by Shaun Gallagher (2005), Thomas Fuchs, (2018), and Dan Zahavi (2005) have replaced the picture of the disembodied mind with the now widely accepted notion of the embedded, enactive, and embodied self. This is a rejection of the long-held assumption that human action must somehow be represented or “mirrored” in the mind. Existentialism illuminates how—as a situated way of being-in-the-world—human beings already embody a tacit understanding of the world in a way that we are not and can never be thematically conscious of. This means we do not understand things as discrete objects. We understand things in terms of how we use and handle them and in terms of the purposive, meaning-giving roles these things play in our everyday lives. The traditional view of the mind as something resembling the rule-governed processes of a computer program have continually failed to capture this ambiguous and embodied sense of being-in-the-world.

The attentiveness to conditions of oppression, subjugation, and violence among postwar existentialists in France has had a decisive impact on recent developments in critical phenomenology by giving voice to those who have been historically marginalized or undervalued in the western tradition. Beauvoir’s pioneering account of the woman’s experience in The Second Sex is well known for laying the conceptual foundations for second wave feminism, and her late career phenomenology of aging broke new ground by shedding light on the existence of older persons and exposing the toxic ageism in contemporary capitalist societies. Together with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, her ideas would inform Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952 [1967]), a seminal work that disclosed the dehumanizing experience of colonized Black populations and helped give birth to Africana critical theory or “black existentialism” (Gordon 2000). The focus on the ways in which structures of discrimination along with the limits of our own embodiment can constrain our capacities for freedom and transcendence has, in turn, influenced recent phenomenological accounts of intersectionality and the lived experience of, among others, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and exiles (Coulthard 2014; Ortega 2016), queer and trans identities (Ahmed 2006; Salamon 2010), those who are imprisoned or in solitary confinement (Guenther 2013; Leder 2016), and the elderly, disabled, and chronically ill (Aho 2022; Reynolds 2022; Dickel 2022).

Interpreting existence in terms of the situated activity of being-in-the-world not only serves as a rejection of substance ontology and the metaphysical dualisms (subject-object; mind-body; inner-outer) that we inherit from Cartesian and empiricist epistemologies; it also reveals deep affinities with the nonduality of Buddhism and other incarnations of Eastern thought. (Loy 2018; Kalmanson 2020) And the recognition of our enmeshment in the world has informed a range of important advances in the philosophy of place, deep ecology, and eco-phenomenology (Brown & Toadvine 2003; Malpas 2017; Morton 2016; Rentmeester 2016). These endeavors have exposed the limitations of the scientific worldview and our uncritical dependence on technological innovation to address the current ecological crisis. Modern science generally assumes a binary paradigm of the subject as separate and distinct from a value-less domain of objects (or nature), a domain that can, in turn, be mastered and controlled by technoscience. In this way, it betrays our ordinary experience, that in our day-to-day lives we are not atomistic, self-certain subjects but beings that are fundamentally entwined with the world and the meaning and value that this intertwining brings to our experience. For the existentialist, then, extricating ourselves from environmental doom requires not a technoscientific fix but an ontological transformation in our own self-understanding, an awaking to the reality of our interdependence with nature, that the earth is not apart from us but rather part of us.

Outside of the humanities and social sciences, existentialism has also had a deep and lasting impact on the allied health professions. The role it has played in the development of existential and humanistic approaches to psychotherapy (Cooper 2003; Spinneli 2007; van Deurzen 2015) and to phenomenological psychopathology (Parnas & Gallagher 2015; Ratcliffe 2015; Stanghellini et al. 2019) is well-known, but in recent years we have seen its influence emerge in a range of different areas, from narrative medicine to nursing, and from gerontology to palliative care. To this end, existentialism has informed a move away from the reductive and objectifying tendencies of modern biomedicine to recover the first-person experience of health and illness, viewing the body not so much as a biophysical machine that needs to be adjusted and maintained but as the experiential and interpretative medium of our existence. This shift has not only allowed clinicians to challenge the emergent tendency to medicalize ever-expanding swaths of the human condition; it makes it possible for the clinician to better understand the patient’s experience by getting a sense of “what it means” and “what it feels like” to suffer when the body breaks down (Aho 2018; Slatman 2014; Svenaeus 2022; Zeiler & Käll 2014).

Beyond its ascendency in the healing arts, its myriad cultural influences, and its wide-ranging impact on the humanities and social sciences, the enduring legacy of existentialism is perhaps most visible in the classroom. Existentialist-themed courses are often among the most popular in the philosophy curriculum as young students confront, for the first time, the unsettling questions of freedom and the meaning of their own existence. And these questions have never been more pressing as they develop against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change, species extinction, global pandemics, and the reemergence of authoritarian and fascist politics. Amidst these planetary emergencies, a new generation is facing the predicament of nihilism and the death of God and owning up to the uncanny truth of the human condition: that existence precedes essence.

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Existentialism: An Overview of Important Themes and Figures

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William C. Pamerleau 2

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‘Existentialism’ is a difficult term to define. Historically, it has been used in a wide variety of contexts and for diverse purposes. As far back as the ancient Greeks, one can find examples of texts that could today be described as existentialist, though it was not until the twentieth century that existentialism emerged as a conspicuous movement. 1 While today we would certainly classify eighteenth century figures like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche as existentialists, they did not use that term to describe themselves. By the time Sartre became famous for his works, shortly after World War II, the term was widely recognized as a description of a certain kind of literature, art, and philosophy, but by then it was also misunderstood by a large portion of society outside of academia. In his popular essay ‘The Humanism of Existentialism’, Sartre jokes that a woman who let loose a vulgarity exclaimed, ‘I guess I’m becoming an existentialist’, which for Sartre illustrates how vague and abused that term had become. 2 It doesn’t help us understand the movement any better to know that its major figures, like Sartre, often denied being existentialists (though for reasons which make perfect sense, if you are an existentialist).

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Mary M. Litch’s Philosophy Through Film provides an introduction to the perennial problems in the history of philosophy (skepticism, relativism, personal identity, etc.) via a discussion of films. Mary M. Litch, Philosophy Through Film (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–2.

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Stephen Mulhall. On Film (London: Routledge. 2002). p. 2.

Jerry Goodenough, ‘Introduction I: A Philosopher Goes to the Cinema’, in Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell , ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2005), p. 25. On the show/tell distinction, see also Julian Baggini, ‘Alien Ways of Thinking’, Film-Philosophy 7, no. 24 (August 2003), < http://www.film-philosophy.com /archive/vo17–2003/>.

Paisley Livingston, ‘Theses on Cinema as Philosophy’, in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy , ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). p. 12.

Thomas E. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy Screened: Experiencing The Matrix ’, in The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings , ed. Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 275.

Bruce Russell, ‘Film’s Limits: The Sequel’, Film and Philosophy 12 (2008): 1.

Consider this observation by Fellini: ‘I do not make moral judgments, I’m not qualified to do so. ...I dislike analyzing, I am not an orator, a philoso-pher or a theorist. I am merely a story-teller and the cinema is my work.’ Federico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), p. 51.

Noël Carroll, ‘Philosophy in the Moving Image: Response to Bruce Russell’, Film and Philosophy 12 (2008): 21.

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1947), pp. 195–199.

Seymour Chatman, ‘What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)’, in Film Theory and Criticism , ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 443.

David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 212.

Colin Wilson, for example, argues that the Sartrean brand of existentialism emphasizes the negative elements of freedom more than the positive ones, thus leaving his work open to these darker consequences. See Colin Wilson, Introduction to The New Existentialism (New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1966). p. 32.

Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre , ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Meridian Books, 1975), pp. 367–368.

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity , trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 316–326.

For a good discussion of how both feminism and Marxism challenge the existentialist emphasis on subjectivity see Judith Butler, ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault’, in Feminism and Critique , ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 128–142.

Kendall Walton argues that the use of photography in the production of film makes us see the objects photographed in a way that other media, like painting, can never do. ‘The invention of the camera gave us not just a new method of making pictures and not just pictures of a new kind: it gave us a new way of seeing.’ Kendall L. Walton, ‘Film, Photography, and Transparency’, in The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Texts and Readings , ed. Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 70–71.

Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Andrè Bazin, What is Cinema?, Vol. I , trans. Hugh Gray (Berkley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 12.

Andrè Bazin, What is Cinema?, Vol. II , trans. Hugh Gray (Berkley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 28.

Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916), < http://www.gutenberg.org /files/15383/ 15383-h/15383-h.htm>, ch. 7.

J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 22.

Bélá Balázs, Theory of the Film (New York: Dover Books, 1970), p. 55.

James Monaco, How to Read a Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 246.

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), pp. 463–464.

Woody Allen, Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Björkman , (New York: Grove Press, 1993), p. 211.

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Pamerleau, W.C. (2009). Existentialism: An Overview of Important Themes and Figures. In: Existentialist Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235465_2

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Exploring Existentialism in Literature (Through 11 Examples)

Existentialism in literature is often a captivating exploration of the human condition, delving into themes of freedom, choice, and the search for meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe. Through the lens of existentialist philosophy, authors have crafted narratives that can resonate with us on a profound level as they question the very essence of existence and the significance of individual experience.

In this article, we will try to appreciate the nuances of existentialism in literature through ten exemplary works, each offering unique insights into the complexities of human existence. So, buckle up and let’s dive into existentialism in literature.

A Brief Introduction to Existentialism

Existentialism , a philosophical movement that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries, grapples with fundamental questions about human existence, purpose, and freedom. At its core, existentialism emphasizes individual experience and the responsibility of each person to define their own existence. Let’s delve deeper into the key aspects of this philosophical framework:

Defining Existentialism

Existentialism defies a rigid definition , as it encompasses a diverse range of perspectives and interpretations. However, at its essence, existentialism emphasizes the subjective experience of individuals and the absence of inherent meaning in the universe. Unlike many other philosophical schools, existentialism does not provide a predetermined set of values or truths; rather, it encourages individuals to confront the existential realities of life and make their own meaning.

Main Themes of Existentialism in Literature

The characteristics of Existentialism in literature manifest through various themes that reflect the core principles of existentialist philosophy. Let’s explore these main themes of existentialism in literature:

Freedom and Choice

Central to existentialist literature is the theme of freedom and choice. Characters grapple with the weight of their decisions and the consequences of their actions, highlighting the existentialist belief in individual agency. Authors depict characters who navigate existential dilemmas, confronting the responsibility of shaping their own destinies in a world devoid of inherent meaning.

Absurdity and Meaninglessness

Existentialist literature often explores the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence. Characters confront the inherent contradictions and irrationality of life, struggling to find significance in a universe that appears indifferent to their aspirations and desires. Through narratives infused with absurdity, authors provoke readers to contemplate the nature of existence and the human quest for meaning in an absurd world.

Alienation and Isolation

The theme of alienation and isolation pervades existentialist literature, reflecting the profound sense of estrangement that individuals may experience in modern society. Characters grapple with feelings of loneliness and disconnection, yearning for authentic connections amidst a world marked by superficiality and alienation. Through narratives of alienation, authors underscore the existentialist notion of individual solitude and the search for genuine human connection.

Search for Authenticity

Existentialist literature explores the search for authenticity, emphasizing the importance of living in accordance with one’s true self and values. Characters confront the pressure to conform to societal norms and expectations, striving to assert their individuality and forge authentic identities. Through narratives of self-discovery and self-realization, authors inspire readers to embrace their uniqueness and resist the constraints of conformity in pursuit of authentic living.

Next, we’ll dive into specific examples of existentialism in literature, examining how these themes manifest in ten exemplary works that resonate with readers across generations.

Examples of Existentialism in Literature

Existentialism finds rich expression in literature, with authors weaving its themes into the fabric of their narratives. Through characters and plotlines, existentialist literature offers profound insights into the complexities of human existence and the search for meaning in a world fraught with uncertainty. Let’s explore ten exemplary works that exemplify existentialism in literature:

#1. Exploring the Absurd in Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”

Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” is a quintessential example of existentialist literature, exploring the theme of the absurd with striking clarity. The protagonist, Meursault, navigates a world devoid of meaning, detached from conventional moral values and societal norms. As Meursault grapples with the absurdity of life, culminating in his confrontation with death, In The Stranger , Camus invites readers to confront the fundamental comparison between absurdism and existentialism and the human quest for meaning in a universe devoid of inherent purpose.

#2. The Search for Meaning in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

In “ The Metamorphosis ,” Franz Kafka delves into the theme of existential alienation through the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. As Gregor grapples with his newfound identity and isolation from society, Kafka explores the existential angst of being trapped in an unfamiliar and hostile world. Through Gregor’s struggle to find meaning amidst his alienation, Kafka offers a poignant commentary on the human condition and the search for significance in a world marked by absurdity.

#3. Confronting Existential Dread in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” delves into the depths of existential dread through the unreliable narrator, known only as the Underground Man. As he navigates the complexities of existence in 19th-century St. Petersburg, the Underground Man grapples with feelings of alienation, nihilism, and existential despair. Dostoevsky’s exploration of the human psyche exposes the inherent contradictions and irrationality of human behavior, challenging readers to confront their own existential anxieties and uncertainties.

#4. Individual Freedom and Responsibility in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea”

Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea” delves into the theme of individual freedom and responsibility, following the protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, as he confronts the existential nausea of existence. Roquentin’s existential crisis unfolds against the backdrop of a provincial French town, where he grapples with the absurdity of human existence and the burden of individual freedom. Through Roquentin’s introspective journey, Sartre explores the existentialist concept of radical freedom and the imperative to create meaning in a world devoid of inherent purpose.

#5. Alienation and Isolation in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”

Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is a seminal work that explores the themes of alienation and isolation through its portrayal of two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait endlessly for the arrival of someone named Godot. As they pass the time with absurd conversations and futile attempts to make sense of their predicament, Vladimir and Estragon grapple with feelings of existential despair and the futility of their existence. Beckett’s masterpiece serves as a profound meditation on the human condition and the search for meaning in a world marked by uncertainty and absurdity.

#6. Identity Crisis and Authenticity in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”

J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” delves into the theme of identity crisis and authenticity through its protagonist, Holden Caulfield. As Holden navigates the tumultuous landscape of adolescence and adulthood, he grapples with feelings of alienation and disillusionment with the superficiality of society. Salinger’s portrayal of Holden’s quest for authenticity resonates with existentialist themes, as he confronts the expectations of conformity and searches for genuine connection amidst a world marked by phoniness and hypocrisy.

#7. The Quest for Meaning in Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”

Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” explores the quest for meaning through the existential journey of its protagonist, Harry Haller. As Haller grapples with his dual nature as both a refined intellectual and a primal “steppenwolf,” he embarks on a soul-searching odyssey in search of authenticity and enlightenment. Hesse’s exploration of spirituality, alienation, and the search for transcendence reflects existentialist themes of individuality and the pursuit of meaning in a world fraught with existential angst and despair.

#8. Choice and Consequences in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” delves into the theme of choice and consequences through its multi-generational saga of the Buendía family. As the Buendías grapple with the cyclical nature of history and the consequences of their actions, García Márquez explores existentialist themes of fate, free will, and the interplay between individual choices and larger societal forces. Through the intricate tapestry of magical realism, García Márquez offers a profound meditation on the human condition and the existential quest for meaning amidst the complexities of life.

#9. Existential Angst in Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”

Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” dives into existential angst through its protagonist, Toru Watanabe, as he navigates the complexities of love, loss, and identity in 1960s Japan. Toru grapples with feelings of alienation and existential despair, haunted by the memories of his past and the uncertainty of his future. Murakami’s introspective narrative explores the existentialist themes of isolation, longing, and the search for meaning in a world marked by impermanence and ambiguity.

#10. Freedom and Despair in Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Albert Camus’ philosophical essay “ The Myth of Sisyphus ” explores the theme of freedom and despair through the allegory of the mythological figure Sisyphus. Camus contends that life is inherently meaningless and absurd, yet he argues that individuals can find liberation through the embrace of their existential condition. By acknowledging the absurdity of existence and embracing the freedom to create meaning in the face of futility, Camus suggests that individuals can confront the existential void with dignity and defiance, finding solace in the act of rebellion against the absurdity of life.

#11. Existentialist Themes of Hell in “No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre”

Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play “No Exit” delves into the themes of hell and existential anguish through its portrayal of three characters trapped in a confined room in the afterlife. As Garcin, Inès, and Estelle confront their pasts and grapple with the consequences of their actions, they are forced to confront the existential truths of their existence. Sartre’s depiction of hell as a state of perpetual self-awareness and interpersonal conflict reflects existentialist themes of individual responsibility and the absence of escape from one’s own consciousness. Through the claustrophobic setting of the play, Sartre invites audiences to contemplate the existentialist notion of hell as the realization of one’s own freedom and the inescapable gaze of others.

Closing Thoughts

Existentialism in literature serves as a profound exploration of the human condition, offering readers a glimpse into the complexities of existence and the search for meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe. Through themes of freedom, choice, absurdity, and authenticity, existentialist literature challenges readers to confront the fundamental questions of existence and to embrace the uncertainty and ambiguity of life with courage and resilience. As we reflect on the diverse array of works discussed in this exploration, we are reminded of the enduring relevance of existentialist philosophy in illuminating the universal truths and complexities of the human experience.

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Existentialism The Best 9 Books to Read

W hat is existence? What does it mean to exist as a human being? Having been ‘thrown’ into a universe apparently devoid of objective meaning, how can we live our lives authentically, when we didn’t even ask to exist in the first place? Do our existences matter? What should we do if they don’t?

These are, broadly, the questions that thinkers tagged with the term ‘existentialist’ — be they philosophers, authors, or artists — have set out to answer over the last 200 years or so of existentialist thought.

Before diving into existentialism’s best books, if you’re interested in quickly learning more about existentialism generally, check out my brief introduction to existentialist philosophy , in which I outline its three core principles, as well as my explainer of the slogan Sartre dubbed the first principle of existentialism, existence precedes essence , my outline of Heidegger on authenticity , my overview of Sartre’s famous discussion of the waiter and bad faith , my overview of 5 existential problems we all share , and my discussion of Simone de Beauvoir on authentic love .

In one concise email each Sunday, I break down a famous idea from philosophy. You get the distillation straight to your inbox:

💭 One short philosophical email each Sunday. Unsubscribe any time.

Otherwise, this reading list puts together the top eight books of and about the philosophical movement of existentialism. It contains a mix of primary and secondary literature — from introductions and anthologies to the original texts of the deeply influential existentialist figureheads themselves. Let’s jump in!

1. At the Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell

At the Existentialist Café

BY SARAH BAKEWELL

Published in 2016, Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café is a fantastic place to start for anyone with a budding interest in existentialism.

With brilliant narrative storytelling, Bakewell outlines the intersecting lives and philosophies of key existentialist figures — from Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, to Husserl, Heidegger, and Camus.

As well as lucidly introducing their thinking, Bakewell contextualizes it to the troubled times in which most core existentialist thinkers lived (i.e. immediately before, during, and after the Second World War), granting deep insight into why different strands of existentialism emerged the way they did.

The 464 pages of At the Existentialist Café fly by and are a joy to read, making this book a very nice entry point to existentialism.

2. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, by Walter Kaufmann

Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

BY WALTER KAUFMANN

Walter Kaufmann was a 20th-century philosopher, poet, and renowned translator of Friedrich Nietzsche (see our reading list on Nietzsche’s best books here ).

In his 1956 Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre , Kaufmann assembles extracts from key existentialist influencers and thinkers including Dostoevsky (see Dostoevsky’s best books here ), Kierkegaard (see Kierkegaard’s best books here ), Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Ortega, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir (see Beauvoir’s best books here ), and Camus (see Camus’s best books here ).

Beyond the fantastic selected works, what makes this collection so invaluable is Kaufmann's excellent introductory essays that contextualize each extract. A classic anthology, this book belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in existentialism.

3. The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, by Steven Crowell

The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism

BY STEVEN CROWELL

If you’re seeking to complement Kaufmann's existentialist anthology with some hardcore critical analysis, look no further than philosophy professor Steven Crowell’s The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism , published in 2012.

In this volume of original essays, Crowell brings together a team of distinguished commentators to discuss the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, showing how their focus on existence provides a compelling perspective on contemporary issues in moral psychology, philosophy of mind, language, and history.

At 428 pages, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism is for those looking to take their understanding of existentialism to the next level.

4. How to Live a Good Life (According to 7 of the World’s Wisest Philosophies), by Philosophy Break

How to Live a Good Life (According to 7 of the World’s Wisest Philosophies)

BY PHILOSOPHY BREAK

★★★★★ (50+ reviews)

If you’re interested in learning not just about Existentialism, but comparing its insights to six rival philosophies for life, look no further than the 2023 How to Live a Good Life (According to 7 of the World’s Wisest Philosophies) . This concise online guide is instantly accessible from any device and distills the best and most important wisdom from Existentialism, Stoicism, Buddhism, and more.

Of course, we’re a little biased, as we produced this one — but if you’re seeking to understand some of life’s most influential ethical frameworks, examine the pros and cons of each, and discover how they might apply to your own life, then this is the guide for you. How to Live a Good Life (According to 7 of the World’s Wisest Philosophies) gets rave reviews, is better value than buying introductory books for all philosophies covered, and might be just what you’re looking for!

5. Either/Or, by Søren Kierkegaard

BY SØREN KIERKEGAARD

Turning from introductions and anthologies to primary existentialist texts, where better to start than with the philosopher often regarded as the precursor to the movement as a whole?

In his 1843 epic Either/Or (which also features in our reading list of Kierkegaard’s best books ), the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard discusses the search for a meaningful existence using the voice of two distinct characters.

A fascinating work on duality, the book’s first section is written from the perspective of an aesthetic and rather callous young man named simply A; the second from the reasonable, ethical Judge Vilhelm.

Kierkegaard invites us to explore subjects like boredom, romance, meaning, and culture from these two seemingly irreconcilable perspectives. In doing so, he writes some utterly heart-wrenching, deeply witty, and memorable prose.

For anyone interested in the origins of existentialist thinking, Either/Or is a fantastic place to start.

6. Being and Nothingness, by Jean-Paul Sartre

Being and Nothingness

BY JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Arguably the cornerstone of existentialist thinking, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s epic 1943 Being and Nothingness — coming in at over 800 pages — is a dense, vivid, and challenging depiction of human existence, and the most explicit expression of existentialist philosophy on this list.

If you’re seeking a less daunting introduction to Sartre’s ideas, a lecture he gave in 1945, published as the short text Existentialism Is a Humanism , is brilliantly accessible and articulate, and is the work that propelled Sartre into international stardom.

Sartre’s 1938 philosophical novel Nausea , too, wonderfully communicates key existential themes of alienation, anxiety, and authenticity.

7. The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir

The Ethics of Ambiguity

BY SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

In her classic 1947 introduction to existentialist thinking, The Ethics of Ambiguity , French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir critiques the positions of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and sets out to provide a new ethics for existentialism.

In clear, accessible, insightful prose, Beauvoir provides novel arguments for and developments of existentialism, and adds detail and weight to her position that authentic individual freedom requires respect for the freedom of others (a position Sartre would come to accept and incorporate into his own philosophy).

An ideal starting point for anyone interested in existentialism, The Ethics of Ambiguity is a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human, and also features on my list of Beauvoir’s best books

8. Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger

Being and Time

BY MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Throughout the history of philosophy, argues the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, we’ve all massively missed something: we’ve never really contemplated what it means to exist, to be .

The philosophical branch of metaphysics has skimmed over this question, focusing instead on things like substance and the categories of our experience; but behind these things, says Heidegger, lies existence itself. What do we mean when we say something exists?

With his landmark 1927 Being and Time , Heidegger seeks to redress the balance by focusing like a laser, for hundreds of pages, on what it means to Be. What is the nature of our existence, as we experience it? Only by paying proper attention to this question, argues Heidegger, can we hope to get anywhere.

Not for the faint hearted, this startling book has had a staggering influence on philosophy, art, literature, and existentialism since its publication — and deeply rewards those who tackle it.

9. The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus

BY ALBERT CAMUS

Though the French thinker Albert Camus rejected the label ‘existentialist’, his writings are widely considered core to the existentialist tradition. His particular brand of existentialism, dubbed ‘absurdism’, explores how even in the face of the outrageous absurdity of the human condition , we can salvage meaning and happiness.

In his hugely influential 1942 philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus , Camus argues that the ultimate question human beings face is not whether there is a God or if certain actions are good or evil, but if life is even worth living. With lyrical eloquence, Camus recommends a path out of despair, affirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of a life lived with dignity and authenticity.

One of the seminal works of the 20th century, anyone interested in existentialism or indeed the meaning of life will not regret reading The Myth of Sisyphus .

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What makes a good life? Existentialists believed we should embrace freedom and authenticity

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How do we live good, fulfilling lives?

Aristotle first took on this question in his Nicomachean Ethics – arguably the first time anyone in Western intellectual history had focused on the subject as a standalone question.

He formulated a teleological response to the question of how we ought to live. Aristotle proposed, in other words, an answer grounded in an investigation of our purpose or ends ( telos ) as a species.

Our purpose, he argued, can be uncovered through a study of our essence – the fundamental features of what it means to be human.

Ends and essences

“Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good;” Aristotle states, “and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims.”

To understand what is good, and therefore what one must do to achieve the good, we must first understand what kinds of things we are. This will allow us to determine what a good or a bad function actually is.

For Aristotle, this is a generally applicable truth. Take a knife, for example. We must first understand what a knife is in order to determine what would constitute its proper function. The essence of a knife is that it cuts; that is its purpose. We can thus make the claim that a blunt knife is a bad knife – if it does not cut well, it is failing in an important sense to properly fulfil its function. This is how essence relates to function, and how fulfilling that function entails a kind of goodness for the thing in question.

Of course, determining the function of a knife or a hammer is much easier than determining the function of Homo sapiens , and therefore what good, fulfilling lives might involve for us as a species.

Aristotle argues that our function must be more than growth, nutrition and reproduction, as plants are also capable of this. Our function must also be more than perception, as non-human animals are capable of this. He thus proposes that our essence – what makes us unique – is that humans are capable of reasoning.

What a good, flourishing human life involves, therefore, is “some kind of practical life of that part that has reason”. This is the starting point of Aristotle’s ethics.

We must learn to reason well and develop practical wisdom and, in applying this reason to our decisions and judgements, we must learn to find the right balance between the excess and deficiency of virtue.

It is only by living a life of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason”, a life in which we flourish and fulfil the functions that flow from a deep understanding of and appreciation for what defines us, that we can achieve eudaimonia – the highest human good.

Read more: Friday essay: how philosophy can help us become better friends

Existence precedes essence

Aristotle’s answer was so influential that it shaped the development of Western values for millennia. Thanks to philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas , his enduring influence can be traced through the medieval period to the Renaissance and on to the Enlightenment.

During the Enlightenment, the dominant philosophical and religious traditions, which included Aristotle’s work, were reexamined in light of new Western principles of thought.

Beginning in the 18th century, the Enlightenment era saw the birth of modern science, and with it the adoption of the principle nullius in verba – literally, “take nobody’s word for it” – which became the motto of the Royal Society . There was a corresponding proliferation of secular approaches to understanding the nature of reality and, by extension, the way we ought to live our lives.

One of the most influential of these secular philosophies was existentialism. In the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre , a key figure in existentialism, took up the challenge of thinking about the meaning of life without recourse to theology. Sartre argued that Aristotle, and those who followed in Aristotle’s footsteps, had it all back-to-front.

Existentialists see us as going about our lives making seemingly endless choices. We choose what we wear, what we say, what careers we follow, what we believe. All of these choices make up who we are. Sartre summed up this principle in the formula “existence precedes essence”.

The existentialists teach us that we are completely free to invent ourselves, and therefore completely responsible for the identities we choose to adopt. “The first effect of existentialism,” Sartre wrote in his 1946 essay Existentialism is a Humanism , “is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.”

Crucial to living an authentic life, the existentialists would say, is recognising that we desire freedom above everything else. They maintain we ought never to deny the fact we are fundamentally free. But they also acknowledge we have so much choice about what we can be and what we can do that it is a source of anguish. This anguish is a felt sense of our profound responsibility.

The existentialists shed light on an important phenomenon: we all convince ourselves, at some point and to some extent, that we are “bound by external circumstances” in order to escape the anguish of our inescapable freedom. Believing we possess a predefined essence is one such external circumstance.

But the existentialists provide a range of other psychologically revealing examples. Sartre tells a story of watching a waiter in a cafe in Paris. He observes that the waiter moves a little too precisely, a little too quickly, and seems a little too eager to impress. Sartre believes the waiter’s exaggeration of waiter-hood is an act – that the waiter is deceiving himself into being a waiter.

In doing so, argues Sartre, the waiter denies his authentic self. He has opted instead to assume the identity of something other than a free and autonomous being. His act reveals he is denying his own freedom, and ultimately his own humanity. Sartre calls this condition “bad faith”.

Read more: Finding your essential self: the ancient philosophy of Zhuangzi explained

An authentic life

Contrary to Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia , the existentialists regard acting authentically as the highest good. This means never acting in such a way that denies we are free. When we make a choice, that choice must be fully ours. We have no essence; we are nothing but what we make for ourselves.

One day, Sartre was visited by a pupil, who sought his advice about whether he should join the French forces and avenge his brother’s death, or stay at home and provide vital support for his mother. Sartre believed the history of moral philosophy was of no help in this situation. “You are free, therefore choose,” he replied to the pupil – “that is to say, invent”. The only choice the pupil could make was one that was authentically his own.

We all have feelings and questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives, and it is not as simple as picking a side between the Aristotelians, the existentialists, or any of the other moral traditions. In his essay, That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die (1580), Michel de Montaigne finds what is perhaps an ideal middle ground. He proposes “the premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty” and that “he who has learnt to die has forgot what it is to be a slave”.

In his typical style of jest, Montaigne concludes: “I want death to take me planting cabbages, but without any careful thought of him, and much less of my garden’s not being finished.”

Perhaps Aristotle and the existentialists could agree that it is just in thinking about these matters – purposes, freedom, authenticity, mortality – that we overcome the silence of never understanding ourselves. To study philosophy is, in this sense, to learn how to live.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism
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Existentialism Essay Topics

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Ph.D., Philosophy, The University of Texas at Austin
M.A., Philosophy, McGill University
B.A., Philosophy, University of Sheffield

If you are studying existentialism and have an exam coming up, the best way to prepare for it is to write lots of practice essays. Doing this helps you to recall the texts and the ideas you have studied; it helps you to organize your knowledge of these; it often triggers original or critical insights of your own.

Here is a set of essay questions you can use. They relate to the following classic existentialist texts:

Tolstoy, My Confession
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Sartre, The Wall
Sartre, Nausea
Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
Sartre, Portrait of an Anti-Semite
Kafka, A Message From the Emperor, A Little Fable, Couriers, Before the Law
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus, The Stranger

Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky

Both Tolstoy 's Confession and Dostoyevsky 's Notes from Underground seem to reject science and rationalistic philosophy. Why? Explain and evaluate the reasons for the critical attitudes toward science in these two texts.
Both Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich (at least once he falls sick) and Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man feel estranged from the people around them. Why? In what ways is the kind of isolation they experience similar, and in what ways is it different?
The underground man says that ‘to be too conscious is an illness.’ What does he mean? What are his reasons? In what ways does the underground man suffer from excessive consciousness? Do you see this as the root cause of his sufferings or are there deeper problems that give rise to it? Does Ivan Ilyich also suffer from excessive consciousness, or is his problem something different?
Both The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Notes From Underground portray individuals who feel separated from their society. Is the isolation they experience avoidable, or is it primarily caused by the sort of society they belong to.
In the "Author's Note" at the beginning of Notes from Underground , the author describes the underground man as "representative" of a new type of person that must inevitably appear in modern society. What aspects of the character are "representative" of this new type of modern individual? Does he remain representative today in 21st century America, or has his "type" more or less disappeared?
Contrast what Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor says about freedom with what the Underground Man says about it. Whose views do you most agree with?
Tolstoy (in Confession ), Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man , and Nietzsche in The Gay Science , are all critical of those who think the main goal in life should be the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Why?
When Nietzsche read Notes from Underground he immediately hailed Dostoyevsky as a ’kindred spirit’. Why?
In The Gay Science , Nietzsche says: “Life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak….being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient." Explain, giving illustrative examples, what you think he means and why he says this. Do you agree with him?
At the beginning of Book IV of The Gay Science , Nietzsche says "all in all and on the whole: some day I wish only to be a Yes-sayer." Explain what he means—and what he is opposing himself to--by reference to issues he discusses elsewhere in the work. How successful is he in maintaining this life-affirming stance?
"Morality is herd instinct in the individual." What does Nietzsche mean by this? How does this statement fit in with the way he views conventional morality and his own alternative values?
Explain in detail Nietzsche’s view of Christianity. What aspects of Western civilization, both positive and negative, does he see as largely due to its influence?
In The Gay Science Nietzsche says: “The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity.” Explain, giving examples, what you think he means and why he says this. Do you agree with him?
In The Gay Science Nietzsche seems to both criticize moralists who distrust the passions and instincts and also himself be a great advocate of self-control. Can these two aspects of his thinking be reconciled? If so, how?
What is Nietzsche’s attitude in The Gay Science towards the quest for truth and knowledge? Is it something heroic and admirable, or should it be viewed with suspicion as a hangover from traditional morality and religion?
Sartre famously observed that "man is condemned to be free." He also wrote that "man is a futile passion." Explain what these statements mean and the reasoning that lies behind them. Would you describe the conception of humanity that emerges as optimistic or pessimistic?
Sartre’s existentialism was labeled by one critic “the philosophy of the graveyard,” and existentialism strikes many as dominated by depressing ideas and outlooks. Why would someone think this? And why might others disagree? In Sartre’s thinking which tendencies do you see as depressing and which uplifting or inspiring?
In his Portrait of the Anti-Semite , Sartre says the Anti-Semite feels the "nostalgia of impermeability." What does this mean? How does it help us understand anti-Semitism? Where else in Sartre's writings is this tendency examined?
The climax of Sartre's novel Nausea is Roquentin's revelation in the park when he contemplates. What is the nature of this revelation? Should it be described as a form of enlightenment?
Explain and discuss either Anny’s ideas about ‘perfect moments’ or Roquentin’s ideas about ‘adventures (or both). How do these notions relate to the major themes explored in Nausea ?
It has been said that Nausea presents the world as it appears to one who experiences at a deep level what Nietzsche described as "the death of God". What supports this interpretation? Do you agree with it?
Explain what Sartre means when he says that we make our decisions and perform our actions in anguish, abandonment, and despair. Do you find his reasons for viewing human action in this way convincing? [In answering this question, make sure you consider Sartrean texts beyond just his lecture Existentialism and Humanism .]
At one point in Nausea , Roquentin says, “Beware of literature !” What does he mean? Why does he say this?

Kafka, Camus, Beckett

Kafka's stories and parables have often praised for capturing certain aspects of the human condition in the modern age. With reference to the parables we discussed in class, explain which features of modernity Kafka' illuminates and what insights, if any, he has to offer.
At the end of The Myth of Sisyphus Camus says that ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’? Why does he say this? Wherein lies Sisyphus’ happiness? Does Camus’ conclusion follow logically from the rest of the essay? How plausible do you find this conclusion?
Is Meursault. the protagonist of The Stranger , an example of what Camus calls in The Myth of Sisyphus an ‘absurd hero’? Justify your answer with close reference to both the novel and the essay.
Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot , is—obviously—about waiting. But Vladimir and Estragon wait in different ways and with different attitudes. How do their ways of waiting express different possible responses to their situation and, by implication, to what Beckett sees as the human condition?

Existentialism in General

From Tolstoy's account of his suicidal despair in his Confession to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, there is much in existentialist writing that seems to offer a bleak view of the human condition. On the basis of the texts you have studied, would you say that existentialism is indeed, a bleak philosophy, excessively concerned with mortality and meaninglessness? Or does it have a positive aspect also?
According to William Barrett, existentialism belongs to a longstanding tradition of intense, passionate reflection on life and the human condition, yet it is also in some ways an essentially modern phenomenon. What is it about the modern world that has given rise to existentialism? And what aspects of existentialism are particularly modern?
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Existentialism Essays

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Middle East Challenges Will Vex Not Only the First 100 Days, but the First 1,000

Photo: Ali Khaligh/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary by Jon B. Alterman

Published September 26, 2024

This commentary is part of a report from the CSIS Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department entitled The Global Impact of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election . The report features a set of essays assessing the meaning of the election for Europe, Russia, Eurasia, the Indo-Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East.

Middle Eastern states have grown used to being a focus of U.S. strategy—and some even seem to view it as an entitlement. Intense U.S. diplomacy following the outbreak of the Gaza war a year ago ended, at least temporarily, a drumbeat of local complaints that the United States was leaving the region. Even so, Middle Eastern states face deep uncertainty about the direction of U.S. policy after November’s presidential election.

The common view is that because the two presidential candidates are so profoundly different in their worldview, their Middle East policies will be similarly divergent. Indeed, early on, the Biden administration sought to differentiate itself sharply from the Trump administration that preceded it. Over time, however, events have narrowed the range of choices available to U.S. policy, and policymakers have come to clearer understandings of both the power and limits of U.S. influence in the region.

On the three main regional policy challenges facing the next president in the Middle East, the clearest difference relates to Iran. On two other issues—the war in Gaza and U.S. relations with Gulf Arab states that seek simultaneously to advance security and autonomy—differences are likely to be narrower than many predict. In truth, though, precisely how the U.S. government will act come January is both unknown and profoundly consequential. Equally unclear is whether different U.S. policies will yield different results.

The new administration will need to establish its approach to Iran in the first weeks of the presidency, in part because Iran is likely to test the new president. Since the United States reneged on the Iran nuclear agreement in 2018, Iranian policy has grown more challenging in many respects. Iranian nuclear enrichment has increased, and Iran’s regional proxies—including but not limited to Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and several Iraqi militias—have increased operations against U.S. allies and interests.

Those close to the former Trump administration, many of whom hope to serve in a future Trump administration, argue that Iran is the thread that runs through all of the challenges to U.S. interests in the Middle East, that their policy of “ maximum pressure ” on Iran was the correct one, and that the reason it did not work is because it was abandoned too soon. They argue strenuously for tightening enforcement of sanctions on Iran, responding vigorously to the actions of Iranian proxies, and demonstrating a willingness to use force against Iran and its assets around the Middle East. Critics of that approach argue that the Trump policy fractured an international coalition that was trying to shape Iranian behavior and freed Iran from any constraints over its nuclear program, leaving Iran much more dangerous than it would have been. The return to a policy of straight coercion, they argue, will have scarcely different results.

Despite the fact that Iran elected reformist Masoud Pezeshkian as president in July, and despite his declared intention to reduce tensions with the West, the next administration will have only a poor set of options. In part, it is unclear whether Pezeshkian has the ability to change the direction of Iranian policy—not only on nuclear issues, but also on issues of Iran’s support for regional proxies and terrorist groups. Powerful groups aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the clerical establishment argue that the United States and its allies are determined to overthrow the Islamic Republic. In addition, even pro-engagement Iranians will look much more skeptically at any proposed U.S. deal. Iranians complain that they never got the promised benefits of the nuclear agreement from the Obama administration, but they also note that any future president could simply walk away from an agreement, as the Trump administration did in 2018. Also, rising great power competition has made it much more difficult to resurrect a broad international coalition against Iranian proliferation.

For several years, Iran has deprioritized efforts to build better relations with the United States, focusing instead on efforts to reduce tensions with Arab Gulf states and warming its ties with Asian consumers. In addition, Russian and Iranian interests have grown strategically aligned since the outbreak of the Ukraine war. But close observers note that while Iran’s regional prospects are waxing, its domestic prospects are waning. An ailing economy, an increasingly disaffected young population, and tattered legitimacy, combined with an 85-year-old supreme leader with no obvious successor, creates uncertainty about the country’s future, whatever the future of U.S. policy. The next president may seek a clear victory but will be unlikely to achieve one.

Elsewhere in the region, the war in Gaza continues to smolder, and the shape of resolution is increasingly difficult to discern. The Israeli government continues to argue that it will not agree to a ceasefire until Hamas has been destroyed, and Arab states are growing increasingly adamant that serious progress toward the creation of a Palestinian state is a prerequisite to their participation in peacemaking. Nearly four out of five Jewish Israelis tell pollsters that peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state is not possible, fearful that it will mean a government with homicidal—or genocidal—intent against Israel will take root on their borders, and Israel will have fewer tools to fight it.

President Joe Biden’s strategy to influence Israeli decisionmaking by warmly embracing Netanyahu right after October 7 seems not to have paid off. Netanyahu has continually demonstrated his resistance to Biden’s entreaties, for both political and strategic reasons. While Biden has had some influence on Israeli policy, most notably slowing an attack on the Rafah crossing, many suggest that he has gotten the worst of both worlds: Some critics blame him for supporting an ineffective Israeli campaign that has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary civilian casualties, while others blame him for hobbling an ally battling terrorism. Many see him as a diminished figure, unable or unwilling to wield the full power of the United States to shape policy outcomes.

Some argue that Netanyahu is seeking to wait out Biden, in hopes that a Trump presidency would create fewer pressures for concessions to Palestinian national aspirations. Some even charge that Netanyahu is doing what he can to create that outcome. Yet, if Netanyahu is relying on Trump to support drawing out the war, it is a riskier bet than many assume. Trump has his own fraught history with Netanyahu, and his few comments on the war have shown impatience with the pace of the Israeli war effort.

A Harris administration would likely follow the broad contours of Biden’s policy, albeit without being buttressed by Biden’s 40-year relationship with Netanyahu and his almost reflexive pro-Israeli impulses. Harris, instead, would reflect an increasingly diverse Democratic Party. It is more polarized on Israel, many minority voters identify to some extent with Palestinians, and most younger voters cannot imagine Israel as an underdog. While a Harris administration would be unlikely to shift the direction of U.S. policy sharply, its tone would be different. The core of the problem is this: The outcome of this war is existential to both Israeli and Palestinian antagonists, but not to the United States. The new president will face loud calls to precipitate an end to the war, but the war is unlikely to end soon.

The third set of issues is related to the other two. The Arab Gulf states have hewn closely to the United States for a half-century, since the United Kingdom pulled back from more than a century dominating the region. In a world that operated on oil, the states were vital Cold War allies and important consumers of billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment every year. As these states vigorously embrace economic diversification in the face of the coming energy transition, they simultaneously are seeking security from the United States alongside strategic autonomy. That is to say, they profess to see no contradiction in pursuing mutual defense agreements with the United States while deepening technological, defense, and economic ties with China and Russia.

For the United States, whose defensive strategy is increasingly oriented around great power competition and advanced by strong alliances, the Gulf’s approach is perplexing. The United States sees itself as the creator and protector of a rules-based order that has brought security and prosperity to billions of people, not least those in the Gulf. The United States has invested trillions of dollars in energy security, which has benefited Gulf energy producers and global consumers alike. Yet, to Gulf states that have come to doubt both U.S. wisdom and commitment, surrendering their own agency seems reckless. Much better, they argue, is to seek close ties with all.

Arguably, they have had some success with such an approach. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) helped negotiate the exchange of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners, and Qatar has been a mediator between the United States and both the Taliban and Hamas. Yet, alarm bells went off in Washington when China seemed to begin to build a military base in the UAE, when Russian capital flooded to Dubai in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and when Saudi Arabia opened its doors to Chinese investment in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and surveillance equipment.

The Gulf states have billions of dollars in deployable capital, considerable regional weight, and a growing bias for action on regional affairs. They have long been content to reflexively support U.S. policy. Increasingly, the leaderships see such an approach as surrendering their leverage. While it would be overstating matters to suggest that they are the linchpin of the United States’ regional strategy, finding ways to reinvigorate partnerships and enlist them in U.S. efforts on Iran and Gaza would contribute significantly to U.S. policy success. While a more transactional Trump administration might seem obviously favorable to their interests, the reality is more complicated. Trump has also spoken loudly of the folly of sustained U.S. military engagement in the Middle East, and he has called for U.S. “ energy dominance ,” which would presumably undermine their efforts to shape markets. In addition, the Gulf states have grown warier of U.S. military action against Iran, where they are likely to bear the brunt of a response.

As in many countries, Middle Eastern governments are accustomed to the fact that while the U.S. president has a strong influence on their security, they have no influence on who the president is, and only rarely have much influence with the president at all. This is true of allies and adversaries alike, of which there are many in the region, and it often creates a combination of fatalism and exasperation. Among both rulers and citizens in the Middle East, U.S. presidents are much more often unpopular than they are popular, and complaints run rife that presidents simply do not understand the region.

If there is a single difference between the region’s leaders and U.S. policymakers, it is this: all of the region’s leaders believe that they will outlast whomever is elected in November, and probably that candidate’s successor as well. They see themselves as taking a long-term view of the region’s challenges, and they see part of their wisdom as appreciating that many of the region’s problems can only be managed, not solved. U.S. presidents enter with the urgency of a four-year term and a public that is impatient for solutions. The U.S. public is increasingly skeptical of U.S. engagement in the Middle East while being eager for better results. Whatever the election’s outcome, hard choices will face the next president and the region’s governments alike.

Jon B. Alterman is a senior vice president, holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy, and is director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

Jon B. Alterman

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Existentialism
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Existentialism is the study of existence. If you take existence to be everything that exists — such as chairs and tables, people and llamas — all philosophy, science, and religion would seem to have the same subject. But existentialism isn't the study of everything that exists; it's the study of exis-tence itself — the study of what ...
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Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of philosophers since the 19th century who, despite large differences in their positions, generally focused on the condition of human existence, and an individual's emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts, or the meaning or purpose of life. Existential philosophers often focused ...
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Let's explore ten exemplary works that exemplify existentialism in literature: #1. Exploring the Absurd in Albert Camus' "The Stranger". Albert Camus' "The Stranger" is a quintessential example of existentialist literature, exploring the theme of the absurd with striking clarity. The protagonist, Meursault, navigates a world ...
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TIE MEANING AND VALUE OF EXISTENTIALISM. BY JOSEPH O'MARA, S.J. Professor of General Metaphysics, St. Stanislaus College, Tullamore. T0 the to-day question from " the What non-professional is existentialism philosopher " the most would com600 be, I. that it is the realistic presentation of human situations, in which.
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The report features a set of essays assessing the meaning of the election for Europe, Russia, Eurasia, the Indo-Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East. ... The core of the problem is this: The outcome of this war is existential to both Israeli and Palestinian antagonists, but not to the United States. The new president will face ...

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Existentialism

1. Nihilism and the Crisis of Modernity

2. Engagement vs. Detachment

5. Authenticity

7. Contemporary Relevance

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Existentialism: An Overview of Important Themes and Figures

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Exploring Existentialism in Literature (Through 11 Examples)

A Brief Introduction to Existentialism

Defining Existentialism

Main Themes of Existentialism in Literature

Freedom and Choice

Absurdity and Meaninglessness

Alienation and Isolation

Search for Authenticity

Examples of Existentialism in Literature

#1. Exploring the Absurd in Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”

#2. The Search for Meaning in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

#3. Confronting Existential Dread in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”

#4. Individual Freedom and Responsibility in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea”

#5. Alienation and Isolation in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”

#6. Identity Crisis and Authenticity in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”

#7. The Quest for Meaning in Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”

#8. Choice and Consequences in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

#9. Existential Angst in Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”

#10. Freedom and Despair in Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”

#11. Existentialist Themes of Hell in “No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre”

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