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April 23 - May 28, 2022
It is sometimes said that existentialism is more of a mood than a philosophy,
Blaise Pascal, who was terrified by the silence of infinite spaces,
you would invariably find it watching you with warm intelligence: the eye of a man interested in everything you could tell him.
traditional philosophers often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment.
They set aside most of what had kept philosophy going since Plato: puzzles about whether things are real or how we can know anything for certain about them. Instead, they pointed out that any philosopher who asks these questions is already thrown into a world filled with things — or, at least, filled with the appearances of things, or ‘phenomena’ (from the Greek word meaning ‘things that appear’). So why not concentrate on the encounter with phenomena and ignore the rest?
Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible. Another phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, added a different spin. Philosophers all through history have wasted their time on secondary questions, he said, while forgetting to ask the one that matters most, the question of Being. What is it for a thing to be? What does it mean to say that you yourself are?
pay attention to things and let them reveal themselves to you.
reinterpretation of the works of Immanuel Kant. Epistemological questions opened out of one another like the rounds of a turning kaleidoscope, always returning to the same point: I think I know something, but how can I know that I know what I know?
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
Above all, he wrote about one big subject: what it meant to be free.
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. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step
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You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, 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 might think you are guided by moral laws, he was saying to them, or that you act in certain ways because of your psychological make-up or past experiences, or because of what is happening around you. These factors can play a role, but the whole mixture merely adds up to the ‘situation’ out of which you must act. Even if the situation is unbearable — perhaps you are facing execution, or sitting in a Gestapo prison, or about to fall off a cliff — you are still free to decide what to make of it in mind and deed. Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who
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Sartre’s existentialism implies that it is possible to be authentic and free, as long as you keep up the effort.
every hope lies within him.
given that we are free, how can we use our freedom well in such challenging times?
From the mid-1940s, ‘existentialist’ was used as shorthand for anyone who practised free love and stayed up late dancing to jazz music.
Sartre and Beauvoir spent many years living in cheap Saint-Germain hotels and writing all day in cafés, mainly because these were warmer places to go than the unheated hotel rooms.
they would admit anyone ‘so long as they were interesting — that is, if they had a book under their arm’.
‘drowning victim’ look,
In reality, Sartre did not need to dangle cheese to get women into his bed. One may marvel at this, looking at his photos, but his success came less from his appearance than from his air of intellectual energy and confidence. He talked enthrallingly about ideas, but he was fun too: he sang ‘Old Man River’ and other jazz hits in a fine voice, played piano, and did Donald Duck imitations. Raymond Aron wrote of Sartre in his schooldays that ‘his ugliness disappeared as soon as he began to speak, as soon as his intelligence erased the pimples and swellings of his face’. Another acquaintance,
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When Sartre was offered the Légion d’honneur for his Resistance activities in 1945, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, he rejected them both, citing a writer’s need to stay independent of interests and influences. Beauvoir rejected the Légion d’honneur in 1982 for the same reason. In 1949, François Mauriac put Sartre forward for election to the Académie française, but Sartre refused it.
‘My life and my philosophy are one and the same’,
By reflecting on life’s vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety. In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully human, responsible life.
Two such misfits in the nineteenth century had a particularly strong influence on the later existentialists: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Neither was an academic philosopher: Kierkegaard had no university career, and Nietzsche was a professor of Greek and Roman philology who had to retire because of ill health.
‘existential’ in a new way to denote thought concerning the problems of human existence.
His companions would struggle to keep up as he strode and ranted and waved his cane.
anything to goad the person into seeing what he meant by the ‘passion’ of existence. Kierkegaard was a born goader. He picked quarrels with his contemporaries, broke off personal relationships, and generally made difficulties out of everything.
He disagreed, for example, with René Descartes, who had founded modern philosophy by stating Cogito ergo sum:
In his own view, human existence comes first:
I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself. Moreover, my existence is mine: it is personal. Descartes’ ‘I’ is generic: it could apply to anyone, but Kierkegaard’s ‘I’ is the ‘I’ of an argumentative, anguished misfit.
He also took issue with G. W. F. Hegel, whose philosophy showed the world evolving dialectically through a succession of ‘forms of consciousness’, each stage superseding the one before until they all rise up sublimely into ‘Absolute Spirit’. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit leads us to a climax as grand as that of the biblical Book of Revelation, but instead of ending with everyone divided between heaven and hell, it subsumes us all into cosmic consciousness.
Sartre agreed with him that this constant choosing brings a pervasive anxiety, not unlike the vertigo that comes from looking over a cliff. It is not the fear of falling so much as the fear that you can’t trust yourself not to throw yourself off.
‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, wrote Kierkegaard. Our whole lives are lived on the edge of that precipice, in his view and also in Sartre’s.
Kierkegaard thought that the answer to ‘anguish’ was to take a leap of faith into the arms of God, whether or not you could feel sure that He was there.
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 way to live is to throw ourselves, not into faith, but into our own lives, conducting them in affirmation of every moment, exactly as it is, without wishing that anything was different, and without harbouring peevish resentment against others or against our fate.
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existentialism. They pioneered a mood of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life. They also worked in the conviction that philosophy was not just a profession. It was life itself — the life of an individual.
Sartre too supported gay rights, although he always insisted that sexuality was a matter of choice, which put him at odds with the views of many gay people who felt that they were simply born that way.
as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed,
A man is not ‘intelligent’; he is free or he is not.
Sartre was the bridge to all the traditions that he plundered, modernised, personalised and reinvented. Yet 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.
Sartre’s final celebrity appearance: his funeral, on 19 April 1980.
Nausea ‘a novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being’.
and thought life would always be one big existentialist café.
By the 1980s, they had given way to new generations of structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists and postmodernists.
a philosophy based on personal experience was ‘shop-girl metaphysics’.
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.
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
As part of all these questions, they asked what individuals could do, and what they themselves had to offer.
