Major Existential Philosophers example essay topic

Existentialism Like 'rationalism' and 'empiricism,' 'existentialism' is a term that belongs to intellectual history. Its definition is thus to some extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates - notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merle au-Ponty, and Albert Camus - existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940's and 1950's. Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom - for instance Camus and Heidegger - repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, the Spaniards Jos'e Ortega y Gas set and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nicholas Berdyaev and Lev Shes tov. The nineteenth century philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one.

Sartre's own ideas were and are better known through his fictional works (such as Nausea and No Exit) than through his more purely philosophical ones (such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason), and the postwar years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the term: retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted; in Paris there were Jean Genet, Andr'e Gide, Andr'e Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel Beckett; the Norwegian Knut Hansen and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belong to the club; artists such as Alberto Giacommeti and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Ars hile Gorky, and Willem de Koning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970's the cultural image of existentialism had become a clich'e, parodied in countless books and films by Woody Allen. It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position; or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted to Sartre's philosophy alone. But while a philosophical definition of existentialism may not entirely ignore the cultural fate of the term, and while Sartre's thought must loom large in any account of existentialism, the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current of twentieth- and now twenty-first century philosophical inquiry, one that has had significant impact on fields such as theology (through Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others) and psychology (from Ludwig Binswanger and Me dard Boss to Otto Rank, R.D. Laing, and Viktor Frankl). What makes this current of inquiry distinct is not its concern with 'existence' in general, but rather its claim that thinking about human existence requires new categories not found in the conceptual repertoire of ancient or modern thought; human beings can be understood neither as substances with fixed properties, nor as atomic subjects primarily interacting with a world of objects. On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science - including the science of psychology - could tell us.

The non-reductive dualist is no better off in this regard than is the physical ist. Nor will it suffice to adopt the point of view of practice and add categories drawn from moral theory: neither scientific nor moral inquiry can fully capture what it is that makes me myself, my 'own most's elf. Without denying the validity of scientific categories (governed by the norm of truth) or moral categories (governed by norms of the good and the right), 'existentialism' may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. To approach existentialism in this categorical way may seem to conceal what is often taken to be its 'heart' (Kaufmann 1968: 12), namely, its character as a gesture of protest against academic philosophy, its anti-system sensibility, its flight from the 'iron cage' of reason. But while it is true that the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time, and while the idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally true that all the themes popularly associated with existentialism - dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness, and so on - find their philosophical significance in the context of the search for a new categorical framework, together with its governing norm.