Existentialism (A Brief Insight)
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 1402768745
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With its emphasis on individuality, freedom, and personal responsibility, existentialism was one of the 20th century’s most significant philosophical movements. Through such writers as Sarte, de Beauvoir, and Camus, it influenced literature, the arts and humanities, and politics. Thomas R. Flynn examines the philosophy’s core beliefs, focusing on several key existential themes, and introduces the leading existentialist thinkers, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Sartre.
self was gradually marginalized and consigned to the domains of spiritual direction, political formation, and psychological counseling. There were important exceptions to this exiling of “moral” truth from the academy. St Augustine’s Confessions (397 CE), Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1669), and the writings of the German Romantics in the early nineteenth century are examples of works that encouraged this understanding of philosophy as care of the self. It is in this larger tradition that
demonstrates the converse of Sartre’s theory of deterministic bad faith, in which individuals behave as they do because they believe they have no choice, that the course of their lives is predetermined. Thomas is shown here in an undated photo. Both the novelist and the poet intensify the awareness and responsibility of the agent. Again, these examples of authenticity are versions of Nietzsche’s transformation of the “it was” into the “I willed it so.” The deterministic form of bad faith, on the
concrete freedom requires that, in choosing, I choose the freedom of others. And “freedom” in this concrete sense means the pursuit of the “open future” of others, that is, the maximization of their possibilities as well as my own. On this account, it would be “inauthentic” to leave others in slavery or a state of oppression, much less to enslave them, for, as de Beauvoir explains, a freedom wills itself authentically only by willing itself as an indefinite movement through the freedom of others.
Goethe, figures of high culture whereas Kierkegaard’s heroes are chiefly biblical in inspiration, neither addressed the issue of social responsibility or other major topics in political philosophy except in passing. Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche was more concerned with the formation of individuals than with the transformation of society. In this sense, the existentialist tradition had yet to face what came to be known in the nineteenth century as the social question, namely, how to achieve an
subjection of man by man. In other words, as we shall see, existentialism is developing a social conscience and, with it, a conviction that the fine arts, literature at least, should be socially and politically committed. In this seminal essay, written in the early postwar years, in a remark he will come to regret, Sartre draws a famous distinction between poetry and prose. Poetry, on this account, signifies any noninstrumentalist form of language or of any art form such as music and visual and