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It is sometimes said that existentialism is more of a mood than a philosophy,
three young philosophers were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar
Simone de Beauvoir, then around twenty-five years old
her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre,
This was Sartre’s debonair old school friend Raymond Aron, a fellow graduate of the École normale supérieure.
The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real.
the summer passed, and he went to Berlin to study. When he returned at the end of his year, he brought back a new blend: the methods of German phenomenology, mixed with ideas from the earlier Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and others, set off with the distinctively French seasoning of his own literary sensibility.
The brilliance of Sartre’s invention lay in the fact that he did indeed turn phenomenology into a philosophy of apricot cocktails – and of the waiters who served them.
Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object. Other things merely sit in place, waiting to be pushed or pulled around. Even non-human animals mostly follow the instincts and behaviours that characterise their species, Sartre believed. But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do.
Sartre put this principle into a three-word slogan, which for him defined existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence’.
But roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms.
it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.
‘You are free, therefore choose – that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.
Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.
If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it’s because it is. Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety.
Sartre’s big question in the mid-1940s was: given that we are free, how can we use our freedom well in such challenging times?
Sartre is now often remembered as an apologist for Communist regimes, yet for a long time he was vilified by the party.
The topic of philosophy is whatever you experience, as you experience it.
strong influence on the later existentialists: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Abstraction is disinterested, but for one who exists his existing is the supreme interest.’
Sartre did not care for this. He had lost his own religious beliefs early in life: apparently it happened when he was about eleven years old and standing at a bus stop. He just knew, suddenly, that God did not exist. The faith never came back, so he remained a stalwart atheist for the rest of his life. The same was true of Beauvoir, who rejected her conventional religious upbringing.
Martin Luther King Jr was among the civil-rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German–American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich.
he insisted all his life that what mattered was not the past at all: it was the future. One must keep moving, creating what will be: acting in the world and making a difference to it. His dedication to the future remained unchanged even as, entering his seventies,
I also became aware that the existentialists were already considered out of fashion. By the 1980s, they had given way to new generations of structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists and postmodernists. These kinds of philosopher seemed to treat philosophy as a game. They juggled signs, symbols and meanings; they pulled out odd words from each other’s texts to make the whole edifice collapse.
The goal of the human sciences was ‘to dissolve man’, he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same.
They asked big questions about what it means to live an authentic, fully human life, thrown into a world with many other humans also trying to live. They tackled questions about nuclear war, about how we occupy the environment, about violence, and about the difficulty of managing international relations in dangerous times.
Atheist existentialists asked how we can live meaningfully in the absence of God. They all wrote about anxiety and the experience of being overwhelmed by choice – a feeling that has become ever more intense in the relatively prosperous parts of the twenty-first-century world, even while real-world choices have shut down alarmingly for some of us. They worried about suffering, inequality and exploitation, and wondered whether anything could be done about these evils. As part of all these questions, they asked what individuals could do, and what they themselves had to offer.
This is why, when reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Camus on rebellion, Heidegger on technology, or Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science, one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news. Their philosophies remain of interest, not because they are right or wrong, but because they concern life, and because they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we? and what should we do?
Merleau-Ponty also wrote: A discussion is not an exchange or a confrontation of ideas, as if each formed his own, showed them to the others, looked at theirs, and returned to correct them with his own … Whether he speaks up or hardly whispers, each one speaks with all that he is, with his ‘ideas’, but also with his obsessions, his secret history.
The story of existentialism is therefore a political and a historical one: to some extent, it is the story of a whole European century.
the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism
personal experience is more interesting when thought about philosophically.
the existentialist-influenced novelist Richard Wright
– Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence. – They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free – – and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes – an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself. – On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world
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