1/15/26, 7:49 AM Existentialism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Existentialism
Existentialism is a catch-all term for those philosophers who consider the nature of
the human condition as a key philosophical problem and who share the view that this
problem is best addressed through ontology. This very broad definition will be clari-
fied by discussing seven key themes that existentialist thinkers address. Those
philosophers considered existentialists are mostly from the continent of Europe, and
date from the 19th and 20th centuries. Outside philosophy, the existentialist move-
ment is probably the most well-known philosophical movement, and at least two of
its members are among the most famous philosophical personalities and widely read
philosophical authors. It has certainly had considerable influence outside philosophy,
for example on psychological theory and on the arts. Within philosophy, though, it is
safe to say that this loose movement considered as a whole has not had a great im-
pact, although individuals or ideas counted within it remain important. Moreover,
most of the philosophers conventionally grouped under this heading either never
used, or actively disavowed, the term ‘existentialist’. Even Sartre himself once said:
“Existentialism? I don’t know what that is.” So, there is a case to be made that the
term – insofar as it leads us to ignore what is distinctive about philosophical positions
and to conflate together significantly different ideas – does more harm than good.

In this article, however, it is assumed that something sensible can be said about exis-
tentialism as a loosely defined movement. The article has three sections. First, we
outline a set of themes that define, albeit very broadly, existentialist concerns. This is
done with reference to the historical context of existentialism, which will help us to
understand why certain philosophical problems and methods were considered so im-
portant. Second, we discuss individually six philosophers who are arguably its central
figures, stressing in these discussions the ways in which these philosophers ap-
proached existentialist themes in distinctive ways. These figures, and many of the
others we mention, have full length articles of their own within the Encyclopedia.
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Finally, we look very briefly at the influence of existentialism, especially outside

philosophy.

Table of Contents
1. Key Themes of Existentialism
a. Philosophy as a Way of Life
b. Anxiety and Authenticity
c. Freedom
d. Situatedness
e. Existence
f. Irrationality/Absurdity
g. The Crowd
2. Key Existentialist Philosophers
a. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) as an Existentialist Philosopher
b. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as an Existentialist Philosopher
c. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) as an Existentialist Philosopher
d. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) as an Existentialist Philosopher
e. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) as an Existentialist Philosopher
f. Albert Camus (1913-1960) as an Existentialist Philosopher
3. The Influence of Existentialism
a. The Arts and Psychology
b. Philosophy
4. References and Further Reading
a. General Introductions
b. Anthologies
c. Primary Bibliography
d. Secondary Bibliography
e. Other Works Cited

1. Key Themes of Existentialism

Although a highly diverse tradition of thought, seven themes can be identified that
provide some sense of overall unity. Here, these themes will be briefly introduced;

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they can then provide us with an intellectual framework within which to discuss ex-
emplary figures within the history of existentialism.

a. Philosophy as a Way of Life

Philosophy should not be thought of primarily either as an attempt to investigate and
understand the self or the world, or as a special occupation that concerns only a few.
Rather, philosophy must be thought of as fully integrated within life. To be sure, there
may need to be professional philosophers, who develop an elaborate set of methods
and concepts (Sartre makes this point frequently) but life can be lived philosophically
without a technical knowledge of philosophy. Existentialist thinkers tended to iden-
tify two historical antecedents for this notion. First, the ancient Greeks, and particu-
larly the figure of Socrates but also the Stoics and Epicureans. Socrates was not only
non-professional, but in his pursuit of the good life he tended to eschew the forma-
tion of a ‘system’ or ‘theory’, and his teachings took place often in public spaces. In
this, the existentialists were hardly unusual. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the rapid
expansion of industrialisation and advance in technology were often seen in terms of
an alienation of the human from nature or from a properly natural way of living (for
example, thinkers of German and English romanticism).

The second influence on thinking of philosophy as a way of life was German Idealism
after Kant. Partly as a response to the 18th century Enlightenment, and under the in-
fluence of the Neoplatonists, Schelling and Hegel both thought of philosophy as an
activity that is an integral part of the history of human beings, rather than outside of
life and the world, looking on. Later in the 19th century, Marx famously criticised pre-
vious philosophy by saying that the point of philosophy is not to know things – even
to know things about activity – but to change them. The concept of philosophy as a
way of life manifests itself in existentialist thought in a number of ways. Let us give
several examples, to which we will return in the sections that follow. First, the exis-
tentialists often undertook a critique of modern life in terms of the specialisation of
both manual and intellectual labour. Specialisation included philosophy. One conse-
quence of this is that many existentialist thinkers experimented with different styles
or genres of writing in order to escape the effects of this specialisation. Second, a no-
tion that we can call ‘immanence’: philosophy studies life from the inside. For

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Kierkegaard, for example, the fundamental truths of my existence are not representa-
tions – not, that is, ideas, propositions or symbols the meaning of which can be sepa-
rated from their origin. Rather, the truths of existence are immediately lived, felt and
acted. Likewise, for Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is essential to recognise that the
philosopher investigating human existence is, him or herself, an existing human.
Third, the nature of life itself is a perennial existentialist concern and, more famously
(in Heidegger and in Camus), also the significance of death.

b. Anxiety and Authenticity

A key idea here is that human existence is in some way ‘on its own’; anxiety (or an-
guish) is the recognition of this fact. Anxiety here has two important implications.
First, most generally, many existentialists tended to stress the significance of emo-
tions or feelings, in so far as they were presumed to have a less culturally or intellec-
tually mediated relation to one’s individual and separate existence. This idea is found
in Kierkegaard, as we mentioned above, and in Heidegger’s discussion of ‘mood’; it is
also one reason why existentialism had an influence on psychology. Second, anxiety
also stands for a form of existence that is recognition of being on its own. What is
meant by ‘being on its own’ varies among philosophers. For example, it might mean
the irrelevance (or even negative influence) of rational thought, moral values, or em-
pirical evidence, when it comes to making fundamental decisions concerning one’s
existence. As we shall see, Kierkegaard sees Hegel’s account of religion in terms of the
history of absolute spirit as an exemplary confusion of faith and reason. Alternatively,
it might be a more specifically theological claim: the existence of a transcendent deity
is not relevant to (or is positively detrimental to) such decisions (a view broadly
shared by Nietzsche and Sartre). Finally, being on its own might signify the unique-
ness of human existence, and thus the fact that it cannot understand itself in terms of
other kinds of existence (Heidegger and Sartre).

Related to anxiety is the concept of authenticity, which is let us say the existentialist
spin on the Greek notion of ‘the good life’. As we shall see, the authentic being would
be able to recognise and affirm the nature of existence (we shall shortly specify some
of the aspects of this, such as absurdity and freedom). Not, though, recognise the na-
ture of existence as an intellectual fact, disengaged from life; but rather, the authentic

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being lives in accordance with this nature. The notion of authenticity is sometimes
seen as connected to individualism. This is only reinforced by the contrast with a
theme we will discuss below, that of the ‘crowd’. Certainly, if authenticity involves ‘be-
ing on one’s own’, then there would seem to be some kind of value in celebrating and
sustaining one’s difference and independence from others. However, many existen-
tialists see individualism as a historical and cultural trend (for example Nietzsche), or
dubious political value (Camus), rather than a necessary component of authentic exis-
tence. Individualism tends to obscure the particular types of collectivity that various
existentialists deem important.

For many existentialists, the conditions of the modern world make authenticity espe-
cially difficult. For example, many existentialists would join other philosophers (such
as the Frankfurt School) in condemning an instrumentalist conception of reason and
value. The utilitarianism of Mill measured moral value and justice also in terms of the
consequences of actions. Later liberalism would seek to absorb nearly all functions of
political and social life under the heading of economic performance. Evaluating solely
in terms of the measurable outcomes of production was seen as reinforcing the secu-
larisation of the institutions of political, social or economic life; and reinforcing also
the abandonment of any broader sense of the spiritual dimension (such an idea is
found acutely in Emerson, and is akin to the concerns of Kierkegaard). Existentialists
such as Martin Heidegger, Hanna Arendt or Gabriel Marcel viewed these social move-
ments in terms of a narrowing of the possibilities of human thought to the instrumen-
tal or technological. This narrowing involved thinking of the world in terms of re-
sources, and thinking of all human action as a making, or indeed as a machine-like
‘function’.

c. Freedom
The next key theme is freedom. Freedom can usefully be linked to the concept of an-
guish, because my freedom is in part defined by the isolation of my decisions from
any determination by a deity, or by previously existent values or knowledge. Many ex-
istentialists identified the 19th and 20th centuries as experiencing a crisis of values.
This might be traced back to familiar reasons such as an increasingly secular society,
or the rise of scientific or philosophical movements that questioned traditional ac-

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counts of value (for example Marxism or Darwinism), or the shattering experience of

two world wars and the phenomenon of mass genocide. It is important to note, how-
ever, that for existentialism these historical conditions do not create the problem of
anguish in the face of freedom, but merely cast it into higher relief. Likewise, freedom
entails something like responsibility, for myself and for my actions. Given that my sit-
uation is one of being on its own – recognised in anxiety – then both my freedom and
my responsibility are absolute. The isolation that we discussed above means that
there is nothing else that acts through me, or that shoulders my responsibility.
Likewise, unless human existence is to be understood as arbitrarily changing moment
to moment, this freedom and responsibility must stretch across time. Thus, when I
exist as an authentically free being, I assume responsibility for my whole life, for a
‘project’ or a ‘commitment’. We should note here that many of the existentialists take
on a broadly Kantian notion of freedom: freedom as autonomy. This means that free-
dom, rather than being randomness or arbitrariness, consists in the binding of one-
self to a law, but a law that is given by the self in recognition of its responsibilities.
This borrowing from Kant, however, is heavily qualified by the next theme.

d. Situatedness
The next common theme we shall call ‘situatedness’. Although my freedom is abso-
lute, it always takes place in a particular context. My body and its characteristics, my
circumstances in a historical world, and my past, all weigh upon freedom. This is
what makes freedom meaningful. Suppose I tried to exist as free, while pretending to
be in abstraction from the situation. In that case I will have no idea what possibilities
are open to me and what choices need to be made, here and now. In such a case, my
freedom will be naïve or illusory. This concrete notion of freedom has its philosophi-
cal genesis in Hegel, and is generally contrasted to the pure rational freedom de-
scribed by Kant. Situatedness is related to a notion we discussed above under the
heading of philosophy as a way of life: the necessity of viewing or understanding life
and existence from the ‘inside’. For example, many 19th century intellectuals were in-
terested in ancient Greece, Rome, the Medieval period, or the orient, as alternative
models of a less spoiled, more integrated form of life. Nietzsche, to be sure, shared
these interests, but he did so not uncritically: because the human condition is charac-
terised by being historically situated, it cannot simply turn back the clock or decide all

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at once to be other than it is (Sartre especially shares this view). Heidegger expresses
a related point in this way: human existence cannot be abstracted from its world be-
cause being-in-the-world is part of the ontological structure of that existence. Many
existentialists take my concretely individual body, and the specific type of life that my
body lives, as a primary fact about me (for example, Nietzsche, Scheler or Merleau-
Ponty). I must also be situated socially: each of my acts says something about how I
view others but, reciprocally, each of their acts is a view about what I am. My freedom
is always situated with respect to the judgements of others. This particular notion
comes from Hegel’s analysis of ‘recognition’, and is found especially in Sartre, de
Beauvoir and Jaspers. Situatedness in general also has an important philosophical
antecedent in Marx: economic and political conditions are not contingent features
with respect to universal human nature, but condition that nature from the ground
up.

e. Existence
Although, of course, existentialism takes its name from the philosophical theme of
‘existence’, this does not entail that there is homogeneity in the manner existence is to
be understood. One point on which there is agreement, though, is that the existence
with which we should be concerned here is not just any existent thing, but human ex-
istence. There is thus an important difference between distinctively human existence
and anything else, and human existence is not to be understood on the model of
things, that is, as objects of knowledge. One might think that this is an old idea,
rooted in Plato’s distinction between matter and soul, or Descartes’ between extended
and thinking things. But these distinctions appear to be just differences between two
types of things. Descartes in particular, however, is often criticised by the existential-
ists for subsuming both under the heading ‘substance’, and thus treating what is dis-
tinctive in human existence as indeed a thing or object, albeit one with different prop-
erties. (Whether the existentialist characterisation of Plato or Descartes is accurate is
a different question.) The existentialists thus countered the Platonic or Cartesian con-
ception with a model that resembles more the Aristotelian as developed in the
Nichomachean Ethics. The latter idea arrives in existentialist thought filtered through
Leibniz and Spinoza and the notion of a striving for existence. Equally important is
the elevation of the practical above the theoretical in German Idealists. Particularly in

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Kant, who stressed the primacy of the ‘practical’, and then in Fichte and early
Schelling, we find the notion that human existence is action. Accordingly, in
Nietzsche and Sartre we find the notion that the human being is all and only what
that being does. My existence consists of forever bringing myself into being – and,
correlatively, fleeing from the dead, inert thing that is the totality of my past actions.
Although my acts are free, I am not free not to act; thus existence is characterised also
by ‘exigency’ (Marcel). For many existentialists, authentic existence involves a certain
tension be recognised and lived through, but not resolved: this tension might be be-
tween the animal and the rational (important in Nietzsche) or between facticity and
transcendence (Sartre and de Beauvoir).

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the human sciences (such as psychology, sociology or
economics) were coming to be recognised as powerful and legitimate sciences. To
some extend at least their assumptions and methods seemed to be borrowed from the
natural sciences. While philosophers such as Dilthey and later Gadamer were con-
cerned to show that the human sciences had to have a distinctive method, the existen-
tialists were inclined to go further. The free, situated human being is not an object of
knowledge in the sense the human always exists as the possibility of transcending any
knowledge of it. There is a clear relation between such an idea and the notion of the
‘transcendence of the other’ found in the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel
Levinas.

f. Irrationality/Absurdity
Among the most famous ideas associated with existentialism is that of ‘absurdity’.
Human existence might be described as ‘absurd’ in one of the following senses. First,
many existentialists argued that nature as a whole has no design, no reason for exist-
ing. Although the natural world can apparently be understood by physical science or
metaphysics, this might be better thought of as ‘description’ than either understand-
ing or explanation. Thus, the achievements of the natural sciences also empty nature
of value and meaning. Unlike a created cosmos, for example, we cannot expect the
scientifically described cosmos to answer our questions concerning value or meaning.
Moreover, such description comes at the cost of a profound falsification of nature:
namely, the positing of ideal entities such as ‘laws of nature’, or the conflation of all

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reality under a single model of being. Human beings can and should become pro-
foundly aware of this lack of reason and the impossibility of an immanent under-
standing of it. Camus, for example, argues that the basic scene of human existence is
its confrontation with this mute irrationality. A second meaning of the absurd is this:
my freedom will not only be undetermined by knowledge or reason, but from the
point of view of the latter my freedom will even appear absurd. Absurdity is thus
closely related to the theme of ‘being on its own’, which we discussed above under the
heading of anxiety. Even if I choose to follow a law that I have given myself, my choice
of law will appear absurd, and likewise will my continuously reaffirmed choice to fol-
low it. Third, human existence as action is doomed to always destroy itself. A free ac-
tion, once done, is no longer free; it has become an aspect of the world, a thing. The
absurdity of human existence then seems to lie in the fact that in becoming myself (a
free existence) I must be what I am not (a thing). If I do not face up to this absurdity,
and choose to be or pretend to be thing-like, I exist inauthentically (the terms in this
formulation are Sartre’s).

g. The Crowd
Existentialism generally also carries a social or political dimension. Insofar as he or
she is authentic, the freedom of the human being will show a certain ‘resolution’ or
‘commitment’, and this will involve also the being – and particularly the authentic be-
ing – of others. For example, Nietzsche thus speaks of his (or Zarathustra’s) work in
aiding the transformation of the human, and there is also in Nietzsche a striking
analysis of the concept of friendship; for Heidegger, there must be an authentic mode
of being-with others, although he does not develop this idea at length; the social and
political aspect of authentic commitment is much more clear in Sartre, de Beauvoir
and Camus.

That is the positive side of the social or political dimension. However, leading up to
this positive side, there is a description of the typical forms that inauthentic social or
political existence takes. Many existentialists employ terms such as ‘crowd’, ‘horde’
(Scheler) or the ‘masses’ (José Ortega y Gasset). Nietzsche’s deliberately provocative
expression, ‘the herd’, portrays the bulk of humanity not only as animal, but as docile
and domesticated animals. Notice that these are all collective terms: inauthenticity

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manifests itself as de-individuated or faceless. Instead of being formed authentically

in freedom and anxiety, values are just accepted from others because ‘that is what ev-
erybody does’. These terms often carry a definite historical resonance, embodying a
critique of specifically modern modes of human existence. All of the following might
be seen as either causes or symptoms of a world that is ‘fallen’ or ‘broken’ (Marcel):
the technology of mass communication (Nietzsche is particularly scathing about
newspapers and journalists; in Two Ages, Kierkegaard says something very similar),
empty religious observances, the specialisation of labour and social roles, urbanisa-
tion and industrialisation. The theme of the crowd poses a question also to the posi-
tive social or political dimension of existentialism: how could a collective form of exis-
tence ever be anything other than inauthentic? The 19th and 20th century presented a
number of mass political ideologies which might be seen as posing a particularly chal-
lenging environment for authentic and free existence. For example, nationalism came
in for criticism particularly by Nietzsche. Socialism and communism: after WWII,
Sartre was certainly a communist, but even then unafraid to criticise both the French
communist party and the Soviet Union for rigid or inadequately revolutionary think-
ing. Democracy: Aristotle in book 5 of his Politics distinguishes between democracy
and ochlocracy, which latter essentially means rule by those incapable of ruling even
themselves. Many existentialists would identify the latter with the American and es-
pecially French concept of ‘democracy’. Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset both espoused
a broadly aristocratic criterion for social and political leadership.

2. Key Existentialist Philosophers

a. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) as an Existentialist

Philosopher
Kierkegaard was many things: philosopher, religious writer, satirist, psychologist,
journalist, literary critic and generally considered the ‘father’ of existentialism. Being
born (in Copenhagen) to a wealthy family enabled him to devote his life to the pur-
suits of his intellectual interests as well as to distancing himself from the ‘everyday
man’ of his times.

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Kierkegaard’s most important works are pseudonymous, written under fictional

names, often very obviously fictional. The issue of pseudonymity has been variously
interpreted as a literary device, a personal quirk or as an illustration of the constant
tension between the philosophical truth and existential or personal truth. We have al-
ready seen that for the existentialists it is of equal importance what one says and the
way in which something is said. This forms part of the attempt to return to a more
authentic way of philosophising, firstly exemplified by the Greeks. In a work like
Either/Or (primarily a treatise against the Hegelians) theoretical reflections are fol-
lowed by reflections on how to seduce girls. The point is to stress the distance be-
tween the anonymously and logically produced truths of the logicians and the per-
sonal truths of existing individuals. Every pseudonymous author is a symbol for an
existing individual and at times his very name is the key to the mysteries of his exis-
tence (like in the case of Johanes de Silentio, fictional author of Fear and Trembling,
where the mystery of Abraham’s actions cannot be told, being a product of and be-
longing to silence).

Kierkegaard has been associated with a notion of truth as subjective (or personal);
but what does this mean? The issue is linked with his notorious confrontation with
the Danish Church and the academic environment of his days. Kierkegaard’s work
takes place against the background of an academia dominated by Hegelian dialectics
and a society which reduces the communication with the divine to the everyday ob-
servance of the ritualistic side of an institutionalized Christianity. Hegel is for
Kierkegaard his arch-enemy not only because of what he writes but also what he rep-
resents. Hegel is guilty for Kierkegaard because he reduced the living truth of
Christianity (the fact that God suffered and died on the Cross) to just another mo-
ment, which necessarily will be overcome, in the dialectical development of the Spirit.
While Hegel treats “God” as a Begriff (a concept), for Kierkegaard the truth of
Christianity signifies the very paradoxicality of faith: that is, that it is possible for the
individual to go beyond the ‘ethical’ and nevertheless or rather because of this very
act of disobedience to be loved by ‘God’. Famously, for Hegel ‘all that is real is ratio-
nal’ – where rationality means the historically articulated, dialectical progression of
Spirit – whereas for Kierkegaard the suspension of rationality is the very secret of
Christianity. Against the cold logic of the Hegelian system Kierkegaard seeks “a truth
which is truth for me” (Kierkegaard 1996:32). Christianity in particular represents the
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attempt to offer one’s life to the service of the divine. This cannot be argued, it can
only be lived. While a theologian will try to argue for the validity of his positions by
arguing and counter-arguing, a true Christian will try to live his life the way Jesus
lived it. This evidently marks the continuation of the Hellenic idea of philosophy as a
way of life, exemplified in the person of Socrates who did not write treatises, but who
died for his ideas. Before the logical concepts of the theologians (in the words of
Martin Heidegger who was hugely influenced by Kierkegaard) “man can neither fall
to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (Heidegger
2002:42). The idea of ‘subjective truth’ will have serious consequences to the philo-
sophical understanding of man. Traditionally defined as animale rationale (the ratio-
nal animal) by Aristotle and for a long time worshiped as such by generations of
philosophical minds, Kierkegaard comes now to redefine the human as the ‘passion-
ate animal’. What counts in man is the intensity of his emotions and his willingness to
believe (contra the once all powerful reason) in that which cannot be understood. The
opening up by Kierkegaard of this terra incognita of man’s inner life will come to
play a major role for later existentialists (most importantly for Nietzsche) and will
bring to light the failings and the weaknesses of an over-optimistic (because modelled
after the Natural sciences) model of philosophy which was taught to talk a lot con-
cerning the ‘truth’ of the human, when all it understood about the human was a muti-
lated version.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve lived in a state of innocence in communication
with God and in harmony with their physical environment. The expulsion from the
Garden opened up a wide range of new possibilities for them and thus the problem of
anxiety arose. Adam (the Hebrew word for man) is now free to determine through his
actions the route of things. Naturally, there is a tension here. The human, created in
God’s image, is an infinite being. Like God he also can choose and act according to his
will. Simultaneously, though, he is a finite being since he is restricted by his body,
particular socioeconomic conditions and so forth. This tension between the finite and
infinite is the source of anxiety. But unlike a Hegelian analysis, Kierkegaard does not
look for a way out from anxiety; on the contrary he stresses its positive role in the
flourishing of the human. As he characteristically puts it: “Because he is a synthesis,
he can be in anxiety; and the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man”
(Kierkegaard 1980:154). The prioritization of anxiety as a fundamental trait of the
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human being is a typical existentialist move, eager to assert the positive role of emo-
tions for human life.

Perhaps the most famous work of Kierkegaard was Fear and Trembling, a short book
which exhibits many of the issues raised by him throughout his career. Fear and
Trembling retells the story of the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham.
God tells Abraham that in order to prove his faith he has to sacrifice his only son.
Abraham obeys, but at the last moment God intervenes and saves Isaac. What is the
moral of the story? According to our moral beliefs, shouldn’t Abraham refuse to exe-
cute God’s vicious plan? Isn’t one of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity the re-
spect to the life of other? The answer is naturally affirmative. Abraham should refuse
God, and he should respect the ethical law. Then Abraham would be in a good rela-
tion with the Law itself as in the expression ‘a law abiding citizen’. On the contrary
what Abraham tries to achieve is a personal relation with the author of the moral law.
This author is neither a symbolic figure nor an abstract idea; he is someone with a
name. The name of ’God’ is the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton (YHVE), the un-
pronounceability indicates the simultaneous closeness and distance of the great
Other. The Christian God then, the author of the moral law at his will suspends the
law and demands his unlawful wish be obeyed. Jacques Derrida notes that the temp-
tation is now for Abraham the ethical law itself (Derrida 1998:162): he must resist
ethics, this is the mad logic of God. The story naturally raises many problems. Is not
such a subjectivist model of truth and religion plainly dangerous? What if someone
was to support his acts of violence as a command of God? Kierkegaard’s response
would be to suggest that it is only because Abraham loved Isaac with all his heart that
the sacrifice could take place. “He must love Isaac with his whole soul….only then can
he sacrifice him” (Kierkegaard 1983:74). Abraham’s faith is proved by the strength of
his love for his son. However, this doesn’t fully answer the question of legitimacy,
even if we agree that Abraham believed that God loved him so that he would some-
how spare him. Kierkegaard also differentiates between the act of Abraham and the
act of a tragic hero (like Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia). The tragic
hero’s act is a product of calculation. What is better to do? What would be more bene-
ficial? Abraham stands away from all sorts of calculations, he stands alone, that is,
free in front of the horror religiosus, the price and the reward of faith.

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b. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as an Existentialist

Philosopher
“I know my lot. Some day my name will be linked to the memory of something mon-
strous, of a crisis as yet unprecedented on earth…” (Nietzsche 2007:88).
Remarkably, what in 1888 sounded like megalomania came some years later to be re-
alized. The name ‘Nietzsche’ has been linked with an array of historical events, philo-
sophical concepts and widespread popular legends. Above all, Nietzsche has managed
somehow to associate his name with the turmoil of a crisis. For a while this crisis was
linked to the events of WWII. The exploitation of his teaching by the Nazi ideologues
(notably Alfred Rosenberg and Alfred Baeumler), although utterly misdirected, ar-
guably had its source in Nietzsche’s own “aristocratic radicalism”. More generally, the
crisis refers to the prospect of a future lacking of any meaning. This is a common
theme for all the existentialists to be sure. The prospect of millennia of nihilism (the
devaluation of the highest values) inaugurates for Nietzsche the era in which the hu-
man itself, for the first time in its history, is called to give meaning both to its own ex-
istence and to the existence of the world. This is an event of a cataclysmic magnitude,
from now on there are neither guidelines to be followed, lighthouses to direct us, and
no right answers but only experiments to be conducted with unknown results.

Many existentialists, in their attempt to differentiate the value of individual existence

from the alienating effects of the masses, formed an uneasy relation with the value of
the ‘everyday man’. The ‘common’ man was thought to be lacking in will, taste in
matter of aesthetics, and individuality in the sense that the assertion of his existence
comes exclusively from his participation in larger groups and from the ‘herd’ mental-
ity with which these groups infuse their members. Nietzsche believed that men in so-
ciety are divided and ordered according to their willingness and capacity to partici-
pate in a life of spiritual and cultural transformation. Certainly not everyone wishes
this participation and Nietzsche’s condemnation of those unwilling to challenge their
fundamental beliefs is harsh; however it would be a mistake to suggest that Nietzsche
thought their presence dispensable. In various aphorisms he stresses the importance
of the ‘common’ as a necessary prerequisite for both the growth and the value of the
‘exceptional’. Such an idea clashes with our ‘modern’ sensitivities (themselves a prod-
uct of a particular training). However, one has to recognize that there are no philoso-
phers without presuppositions, and that Nietzsche’s insistence on the value of the ex-
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ceptional marks his own beginning and his own understanding of the mission of
thought.

Despite the dubious politics that the crisis of meaning gave rise to, the crisis itself is
only an after-effect of a larger and deeper challenge that Nietzsche’s work identifies
and poses. For Nietzsche the crisis of meaning is inextricably linked to the crisis of re-
ligious consciousness in the West. Whereas for Kierkegaard the problem of meaning
was to be resolved through the individual’s relation to the Divine, for Nietzsche the
militantly anti-Christian, the problem of meaning is rendered possible at all because
of the demise of the Divine. As he explains in The Genealogy of Morality, it is only af-
ter the cultivation of truth as a value by the priest that truth comes to question its
own value and function. What truth discovers is that at the ground of all truth lies an
unquestionable faith in the value of truth. Christianity is destroyed when it is pushed
to tell the truth about itself, when the illusions of the old ideals are revealed. What is
called ‘The death of God’ is also then the death of truth (though not of the value of
truthfulness); this is an event of immense consequences for the future.

But one has to be careful here. Generations of readers, by concentrating on the event
of the actual announcement of the ‘death of God’, have completely missed madman’s
woeful mourning which follows the announcement. “‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I‘ll tell
you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do
this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Where is it moving? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns?” (Nietzsche
2001:125). The above sentences are very far from constituting a cheerful declaration:
no one is happy here! Nietzsche’s atheism has nothing to do with the naive atheism of
others (for example Sartre) who rush to affirm their freedom as if their petty individ-
uality were able to fill the vast empty space left by the absence of God. Nietzsche is
not naive and because he is not naive he is rather pessimistic. What the death of God
really announces is the demise of the human as we know it. One has to think of this
break in the history of the human in Kantian terms. Kant famously described
Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” (Kant
1991:54). Similarly Nietzsche believes that the demise of the divine could be the op-
portunity for the emergence of a being which derives the meaning of its existence
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from within itself and not from some authority external to it. If the meaning of the
human derived from God then, with the universe empty, man cannot take the place of
the absent God. This empty space can only be filled by something greater and fuller,
which in the Nietzschean jargon means the greatest unity of contradictory forces.
That is the Übermensch (Overhuman) which for Nietzsche signifies the attempt to-
wards the cultural production of a human being which will be aware of his dual de-
scent – from animality and from rationality – without prioritizing either one, but
keeping them in an agonistic balance so that through struggle new and exciting forms
of human existence can be born.

Nietzsche was by training a Klassische Philologe (the rough equivalent Anglosaxon

would be an expert in classics – the texts of the ancient Greek and Roman authors).
Perhaps because of his close acquaintance with the ancient writers, he became sensi-
tive to a quite different understanding of philosophical thinking to that of his contem-
poraries. For the Greeks, philosophical questioning takes place within the perspective
of a certain choice of life. There is no ‘life’ and then quite separately the theoretical
(theoria: from thea – view, and horan – to see) or ‘from a distance’ contemplation of
phenomena. Philosophical speculation is the result of a certain way of life and the at-
tempted justification of this life. Interestingly Kant encapsulates this attitude in the
following passage: “When will you finally begin to live virtuously?’ said Plato to an old
man who told him he was attending classes on virtue. The point is not always to spec-
ulate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge. Today, however, he
who lives in conformity with what he teaches is taken for a dreamer” (Kant in Hadot
2002:xiii). We have to understand Nietzsche’s relation to philosophy within this con-
text not only because it illustrates a stylistically different contemplation but because
it demonstrates an altogether different way of philosophizing. Thus in Twilight of the
Idols Nietzsche accuses philosophers for their ‘Egyptism’, the fact that they turn ev-
erything into a concept under evaluation. “All that philosophers have been handling
for thousands of years is conceptual mummies; nothing real has ever left their hands
alive” (Nietzsche 1998:16). Philosophical concepts are valuable insofar as they serve a
flourishing life, not as academic exercises. Under the new model of philosophy the old
metaphysical and moral questions are to be replaced by new questions concerning
history, genealogy, environmental conditions and so forth. Let us take a characteristic
passage from 1888: “I am interested in a question on which the ‘salvation of human-
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ity’ depends more than on any curio of the theologians: the question of nutrition. For
ease of use, one can put it in the following terms: ‘how do you personally have to
nourish yourself in order to attain your maximum of strength, of virtù in the
Renaissance style, of moraline-free virtue?” (Nietzsche 2007:19).

What is Nietzsche telling us here? Two things: firstly that, following the tradition of
Spinoza, the movement from transcendence to immanence passes through the reha-
bilitation of the body. To say that, however, does not imply a simple-minded materi-
alism. When Spinoza tells “nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s ca-
pabilities” (Spinoza 2002: 280) he is not writing about something like bodily strength
but to the possibility of an emergence of a body liberated from the sedimentation of
culture and memory. This archetypical body is indeed as yet unknown and we stand
in ignorance of its abilities. The second thing that Nietzsche is telling us in the above
passage is that this new immanent philosophy necessarily requires a new ethics. One
has to be clear here because of the many misunderstandings of Nietzschean ethics.
Nietzsche is primarily a philosopher of ethics but ethics here refers to the possible
justification of a way of life, which way of life in turn justifies human existence on
earth. For Nietzsche, ethics does not refer to moral codes and guidelines on how to
live one’s life. Morality, which Nietzsche rejects, refers to the obsessive need (a need
or an instinct can also be learned according to Nietzsche) of the human to preserve its
own species and to regard its species as higher than the other animals. In short
morality is arrogant. A Nietzschean ethics is an ethics of modesty. It places the hu-
man back where it belongs, among the other animals. However to say that is not to
equate the human with the animal. Unlike non-human animals men are products of
history that is to say products of memory. That is their burden and their
responsibility.

In the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche explains morality as a system aiming at the

taming of the human animal. Morality’s aim is the elimination of the creative power
of animal instincts and the establishment of a life protected within the cocoon of as-
cetic ideals. These ‘ideals’ are all those values and ideologies made to protect man
against the danger of nihilism, the state in which man finds no answer to the question
of his existence. Morality clings to the preservation of the species ‘man’; morality
stubbornly denies the very possibility of an open-ended future for humans. If we
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could summarize Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology in a few words, we would

say that for Nietzsche it is necessary to attempt (there are no guarantees here) to
think of the human not as an end-in-itself but only as a means to something “…per-
fect, completely finished, happy, powerful, triumphant, that still leaves something to
fear!” (Nietzsche 2007:25).

c. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) as an Existentialist

Philosopher
Heidegger exercised an unparalleled influence on modern thought. Without knowl-
edge of his work recent developments in modern European philosophy (Sartre,
Gadamer, Arendt, Marcuse, Derrida, Foucault et al.) simply do not make sense. He
remains notorious for his involvement with National Socialism in the 1930s. Outside
European philosophy, Heidegger is only occasionally taken seriously, and is some-
times actually ridiculed (famously the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer called him a
‘charlatan’).

In 1945 in Paris Jean-Paul Sartre gave a public lecture with the title ‘Existentialism is
a Humanism’ where he defended the priority of action and the position that it is a
man’s actions which define his humanity. In 1946, Jean Beaufret in a letter to
Heidegger poses a number of questions concerning the link between humanism and
the recent developments of existentialist philosophy in France. Heidegger’s response
is a letter to Beaufret which in 1947 is published in a book form with the title ‘Letter
on Humanism’. There he repudiates any possible connection of his philosophy with
the existentialism of Sartre. The question for us here is the following: Is it possible,
given Heidegger’s own repudiation of existentialism, still to characterise Heidegger’s
philosophy as ‘existentialist’? The answer here is that Heidegger can be classified as
an existentialist thinker despite all his differences from Sartre. Our strategy is to
stress Heidegger’s connection with some key existentialist concerns, which we intro-
duced above under the labels ‘Existence’, ‘Anxiety’ and the ‘Crowd’.

We have seen above that a principle concern of all existentialists was to affirm the pri-
ority of individual existence and to stress that human existence is to be investigated
with methods other than those of the natural sciences. This is also one of Heidegger’s
principle concerns. His magnum opus Being and Time is an investigation into the
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meaning of Being as that manifests itself through the human being, Dasein. The sci-
ences have repeatedly asked ‘What is a man?’ ‘What is a car?’ ‘What is an emotion?’
they have nevertheless failed – and because of the nature of science, had to fail – to
ask the question which grounds all those other questions. This question is what is the
meaning of (that) Being which is not an entity (like other beings, for example a chair,
a car, a rock) and yet through it entities have meaning at all? Investigating the ques-
tion of the meaning of Being we discover that it arises only because it is made possible
by the human being which poses the question. Dasein has already a (pre-conceptual)
understanding of Being because it is the place where Being manifests itself. Unlike
the traditional understanding of the human as a hypokeimenon (Aristotle) – what
through the filtering of Greek thought by the Romans becomes substantia, that which
supports all entities and qualities as their base and their ground – Dasein refers to the
way which human beings are. ”The essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (Heidegger
1962: 67) and the existence of Dasein is not fixed like the existence of a substance is.
This is why human beings locate a place which nevertheless remains unstable and un-
fixed. The virtual place that Dasein occupies is not empty. It is filled with beings
which ontologically structure the very possibility of Dasein. Dasein exists as in-the-
world. World is not something separate from Dasein; rather, Dasein cannot be under-
stood outside the referential totality which constitutes it. Heidegger repeats here a fa-
miliar existentialist pattern regarding the situatedness of experience.

Sartre, by contrast, comes from the tradition of Descartes and to this tradition re-
mains faithful. From Heidegger’s perspective, Sartre’s strategy of affirming the prior-
ity of existence over essence is a by-product of the tradition of Renaissance human-
ism which wishes to assert the importance of man as the highest and most splendid of
finite beings. Sartrean existence refers to the fact that a human is whereas
Heidegger’s ek-sistence refers to the way with which Dasein is thrown into a world of
referential relations and as such Dasein is claimed by Being to guard its truth. Sartre,
following Descartes, thinks of the human as a substance producing or sustaining enti-
ties, Heidegger on the contrary thinks of the human as a passivity which accepts the
call of Being. “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being”
(Heidegger 1993:245). The Heideggerian priority then is Being, and Dasein’s impor-
tance lies in its receptiveness to the call of Being.

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For Kierkegaard anxiety defines the possibility of responsibility, the exodus of man
from the innocence of Eden and his participation to history. But the birthplace of
anxiety is the experience of nothingness, the state in which every entity is experienced
as withdrawn from its functionality. “Nothing … gives birth to anxiety” (Kierkegaard
1980:41). In anxiety we do not fear something in particular but we experience the ter-
ror of a vacuum in which is existence is thrown. Existentialist thinkers are interested
in anxiety because anxiety individualizes one (it is when I feel Angst more than every-
thing that I come face to face with my own individual existence as distinct from all
other entities around me). Heidegger thinks that one of the fundamental ways with
which Dasein understands itself in the world is through an array of ‘moods’. Dasein
always ‘finds itself’ (befinden sich) in a certain mood. Man is not a thinking thing de-
associated from the world, as in Cartesian metaphysics, but a being which finds itself
in various moods such as anxiety or boredom. For the Existentialists, primarily and
for the most part I don’t exist because I think (recall Descartes’ famous formula) but
because my moods reveal to me fundamental truths of my existence. Like
Kierkegaard, Heidegger also believes that anxiety is born out of the terror of nothing-
ness. “The obstinacy of the ‘nothing and nowhere within-the-world’ means as a phe-
nomenon that the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety”
(Heidegger 1962:231). For Kierkegaard the possibility of anxiety reveals man’s dual
nature and because of this duality man can be saved. “If a human being were a beast
or an angel, he could not be in anxiety. Because he is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety;
and the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man” (Kierkegaard
1980:155). Equally for Heidegger anxiety manifests Dasein’s possibility to live an au-
thentic existence since it realizes that the crowd of ‘others’ (what Heidegger calls the
‘They’) cannot offer any consolation to the drama of existence.

In this article we have discussed the ambiguous or at times downright critical attitude
of many existentialists toward the uncritical and unreflecting masses of people who,
in a wholly anti-Kantian and thus also anti-Enlightenment move, locate the meaning
of their existence in an external authority. They thus give up their (purported) auton-
omy as rational beings. For Heidegger, Dasein for the most part lives inauthentically
in that Dasein is absorbed in a way of life produced by others, not by Dasein itself.
“We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see and
judge about literature and art as they see and judge…” (Heidegger 1962:164). To be
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sure this mode of existence, the ‘They’ (Das Man) is one of the existentialia, it is an a
priori condition of possibility of the Dasein which means that inauthenticity is in-
scribed into the mode of being of Dasein, it does not come from the outside as a bad
influence which could be erased. Heidegger’s language is ambiguous on the problem
of inauthenticity and the reader has to make his mind on the status of the ‘They’. A lot
has been said on the possible connections of Heidegger’s philosophy with his political
engagements. Although it is always a risky business to read the works of great
philosophers as political manifestos, it seems prima facie evident that Heidegger’s
thought in this area deserves the close investigation it has received.

Heidegger was a highly original thinker. His project was nothing less than the over-
coming of Western metaphysics through the positing of the forgotten question of be-
ing. He stands in a critical relation to past philosophers but simultaneously he is
heavily indebted to them, much more than he would like to admit. This is not to ques-
tion his originality, it is to recognize that thought is not an ex nihilo production; it
comes as a response to things past, and aims towards what is made possible through
that past.

d. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) as an Existentialist

Philosopher
In the public consciousness, at least, Sartre must surely be the central figure of exis-
tentialism. All the themes that we introduced above come together in his work. With
the possible exception of Nietzsche, his writings are the most widely anthologised (es-
pecially the lovely, if oversimplifying, lecture ‘Existentialism and Humanism’) and his
literary works are widely read (especially the novel Nausea) or performed. Although
uncomfortable in the limelight, he was nevertheless the very model of a public intel-
lectual, writing hundreds of short pieces for public dissemination and taking reso-
lutely independent and often controversial stands on major political events. His writ-
ings that are most clearly existentialist in character date from Sartre’s early and mid-
dle period, primarily the 1930s and 1940s. From the 1950s onwards, Sartre moved his
existentialism towards a philosophy the purpose of which was to understand the pos-
sibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics.

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Sartre was in his late 20s when he first encountered phenomenology, specifically the
philosophical ideas of Edmund Husserl. (We should point out that Heidegger was
also deeply influenced by Husserl, but it is less obvious in the language he employs
because he drops the language of consciousness and acts.) Of particular importance,
Sartre thought, was Husserl’s notion of intentionality. In Sartre’s interpretation of
this idea, consciousness is not to be identified with a thing (for example a mind, soul
or brain), that is to say some kind of a repository of ideas and images of things.
Rather, consciousness is nothing but a directedness towards things. Sartre found a
nice way to sum up the notion of the intentional object: If I love her, I love her be-
cause she is lovable (Sartre 1970:4-5). Within my experience, her lovableness is not
an aspect of my image of her, rather it is a feature of her (and ultimately a part of the
world) towards which my consciousness directs itself. The things I notice about her
(her smile, her laugh) are not originally neutral, and then I interpret the idea of them
as ‘lovely’, they are aspects of her as lovable. The notion that consciousness is not a
thing is vital to Sartre. Indeed, consciousness is primarily to be characterised as noth-
ing: it is first and foremost not that which it is conscious of. (Sartre calls human exis-
tence the ‘for-itself’, and the being of things the ‘in-itself’.) Because it is not a thing, it
is not subject to the laws of things; specifically, it is not part of a chain of causes and
its identity is not akin to that of a substance. Above we suggested that a concern with
the nature of existence, and more particularly a concern with the distinctive nature of
human existence, are defining existentialist themes.

Moreover, qua consciousness, and not a thing that is part of the causal chain, I am
free. From moment to moment, my every action is mine alone to choose. I will of
course have a past ‘me’ that cannot be dispensed with; this is part of my ‘situation’.
However, again, I am first and foremost not my situation. Thus, at every moment I
choose whether to continue on that life path, or to be something else. Thus, my exis-
tence (the mere fact that I am) is prior to my essence (what I make of myself through
my free choices). I am thus utterly responsible for myself. If my act is not simply
whatever happens to come to mind, then my action may embody a more general prin-
ciple of action. This principle too is one that I must have freely chosen and committed
myself to. It is an image of the type of life that I believe has value. (In these ways,
Sartre intersects with the broadly Kantian account of freedom which we introduced
above in our thematic section.) As situated, I also find myself surrounded by such im-
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ages – from religion, culture, politics or morality – but none compels my freedom.
(All these forces that seek to appropriate my freedom by objectifying me form Sartre’s
version of the crowd theme.) I exist as freedom, primarily characterised as not deter-
mined, so my continuing existence requires the ever renewed exercise of freedom
(thus, in our thematic discussion above, the notion from Spinoza and Leibniz of exis-
tence as a striving-to-exist). Thus also, my non-existence, and the non-existence of
everything I believe in, is only a free choice away. I (in the sense of an authentic hu-
man existence) am not what I ‘am’ (the past I have accumulated, the things that sur-
round me, or the way that others view me). I am alone in my responsibility; my exis-
tence, relative to everything external that might give it meaning, is absurd. Face to
face with such responsibility, I feel ‘anxiety’. Notice that although Sartre’s account of
situatedness owes much to Nietzsche and Heidegger, he sees it primarily in terms of
what gives human freedom its meaning and its burden. Nietzsche and Heidegger, in
contrast, view such a conception of freedom as naively metaphysical.

Suppose, however, that at some point I am conscious of myself in a thing-like way.

For example, I say ‘I am a student’ (treating myself as having a fixed, thing-like iden-
tity) or ‘I had no choice’ (treating myself as belonging to the causal chain). I am as-
cribing a fixed identity or set of qualities to myself, much as I would say ‘that is a
piece of granite’. In that case I am existing in denial of my distinctively human mode
of existence; I am fleeing from my freedom. This is inauthenticity or ‘bad faith’. As we
shall see, inauthenticity is not just an occasional pitfall of human life, but essential to
it. Human existence is a constant falling away from an authentic recognition of its
freedom. Sartre here thus echoes the notion in Heidegger than inauthenticity is a con-
dition of possibility of human existence.

Intentionality manifests itself in another important way. Rarely if ever am I simply

observing the world; instead I am involved in wanting to do something, I have a goal
or purpose. Here, intentional consciousness is not a static directedness towards
things, but is rather an active projection towards the future. Suppose that I undertake
as my project marrying my beloved. This is an intentional relation to a future state of
affairs. As free, I commit myself to this project and must reaffirm that commitment at
every moment. It is part of my life project, the image of human life that I offer to my-
self and to others as something of value. Notice, however, that my project involves in-
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authenticity. I project myself into the future where I will be married to her – that is, I
define myself as ‘married’, as if I were a fixed being. Thus there is an essential tension
to all projection. On the one hand, the mere fact that I project myself into the future is
emblematic of my freedom; only a radically free consciousness can project itself. I ex-
ist as projecting towards the future which, again, I am not. Thus, I am (in the sense of
an authentic self) what I am not (because my projecting is always underway towards
the future). On the other hand, in projecting I am projecting myself as something,
that is, as a thing that no longer projects, has no future, is not free. Every action, then,
is both an expression of freedom and also a snare of freedom. Projection is absurd: I
seek to become the impossible object, for-itself-in-itself, a thing that is both free and a
mere thing. Born of this tension is a recognition of freedom, what it entails, and its
essential fragility. Thus, once again, we encounter existential anxiety. (In this article,
we have not stressed the importance of the concept of time for existentialism, but it
should not be overlooked: witness one of Nietzsche’s most famous concepts (eternal
recurrence) and the title of Heidegger’s major early work (Being and Time).)

In my intentional directedness towards my beloved I find her ‘loveable’. This too,

though, is an objectification. Within my intentional gaze, she is loveable in much the
same way that granite is hard or heavy. Insofar as I am in love, then, I seek to deny
her freedom. Insofar, however, as I wish to be loved by her, then she must be free to
choose me as her beloved. If she is free, she escapes my love; if not, she cannot love. It
is in these terms that Sartre analyses love in Part Three of Being and Nothingness.
Love here is a case study in the basic forms of social relation. Sartre is thus moving
from an entirely individualistic frame of reference (my self, my freedom and my
projects) towards a consideration of the self in concrete relations with others. Sartre
is working through – in a way he would shortly see as being inadequate – the issues
presented by the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, which we mentioned above. This
‘hell’ of endlessly circling acts of freedom and objectification is brilliantly dramatised
in Sartre’s play No Exit.

A few years later at the end of the 1940s, Sartre wrote what has been published as
Notebooks for an Ethics. Sartre (influenced in the meantime by the criticisms of
Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir, and by his increasing commitment to collectivist
politics) elaborated greatly his existentialist account of relations with others, taking
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the Hegelian idea more seriously. He no longer thinks of concrete relations so pes-
simistically. While Nietzsche and Heidegger both suggest the possibility of an authen-
tic being with others, both leave it seriously under-developed. For our purposes, there
are two key ideas in the Notebooks. The first is that my projects can be realised only
with the cooperation of others; however, that cooperation presupposes their freedom
(I cannot make her love me), and their judgements about me must concern me.
Therefore permitting and nurturing the freedom of others must be a central part of all
my projects. Sartre thus commits himself against any political, social or economic
forms of subjugation. Second, there is the possibility of a form of social organisation
and action in which each individual freely gives him or herself over to a joint project:
a ‘city of ends’ (this is a reworking of Kant’s idea of the ‘kingdom of ends’, found in
the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals). An authentic existence, for Sartre,
therefore means two things. First, it is something like a ‘style’ of existing – one that at
every moment is anxious, and that means fully aware of the absurdity and fragility of
its freedom. Second, though, there is some minimal level of content to any authentic
project: whatever else my project is, it must also be a project of freedom, for myself
and for others.

e. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) as an Existentialist

Philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir was the youngest student ever to pass the demanding agrégation
at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. Subsequently a star Normalienne, she
was a writer, philosopher, feminist, lifelong partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, notorious for
her anti-bourgeois way of living and her free sexual relationships which included
among others a passionate affair with the American writer Nelson Algren. Much ink
has been spilled debating whether de Beauvoir’s work constitutes a body of indepen-
dent philosophical work, or is a reformulation of Sartre’s work. The debate rests of
course upon the fundamental misconception that wants a body of work to exist and
develop independently of (or uninfluenced by) its intellectual environment. Such ‘ob-
jectivity’ is not only impossible but also undesirable: such a body of work would be ul-
timately irrelevant since it would be non-communicable. So the question of de
Beauvoir’s ‘independence’ could be dismissed here as irrelevant to the philosophical
questions that her work raises.

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In 1943 Being and Nothingness, the groundwork of the Existentialist movement in

France was published. There Sartre gave an account of freedom as ontological consti-
tutive of the subject. One cannot but be free: this is the kernel of the Sartrean concep-
tion of freedom. In 1945 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is published.
There, as well as in an essay from the same year titled ‘The war has taken place’,
Merleau-Ponty heavily criticizes the Sartrean stand, criticising it as a reformulation of
basic Stoic tenets. One cannot assume freedom in isolation from the freedom of oth-
ers. Action is participatory: “…my freedom is interwoven with that of others by way of
the world” (Merleau-Ponty in Stewart 1995:315). Moreover action takes place within
a certain historical context. For Merleau-Ponty the subjective free-will is always in a
dialectical relationship with its historical context. In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir’s
Ethics of Ambiguity is published. The book is an introduction to existentialism but
also a subtle critique of Sartre’s position on freedom, and a partial extension of exis-
tentialism towards the social. Although de Beauvoir will echo Merleau-Ponty’s criti-
cism regarding the essential interrelation of the subjects, nevertheless she will leave
unstressed the importance that the social context plays in the explication of moral
problems. Like Sartre it is only later in her life that this will be acknowledged. In any
case, de Beauvoir’s book precipitates in turn a major rethink on Sartre’s part, and the
result is the Notebooks for an Ethics.

In Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir offers a picture of the human subject as con-

stantly oscillating between facticity and transcendence. Whereas the human is always
already restricted by the brute facts of his existence, nevertheless it always aspires to
overcome its situation, to choose its freedom and thus to create itself. This tension
must be considered positive, and not restrictive of action. It is exactly because the on-
tology of the human is a battleground of antithetical movements (a view consistent
with de Beauvoir’s Hegelianism) that the subject must produce an ethics which will
be continuous with its ontological core. The term for this tension is ambiguity.
Ambiguity is not a quality of the human as substance, but a characterisation of hu-
man existence. We are ambiguous beings destined to throw ourselves into the future
while simultaneously it is our very own existence that throws us back into facticity.
That is to say, back to the brute fact that we are in a sense always already destined to
fail – not in this or that particular project but to fail as pure and sustained transcen-
dence. It is exactly because of (and through) this fundamental failure that we realize
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that our ethical relation to the world cannot be self-referential but must pass through
the realization of the common destiny of the human as a failed and interrelated being.

De Beauvoir, unlike Sartre, was a scholarly reader of Hegel. Her position on an exis-
tential ethics is thus more heavily influenced by Hegel’s view in the Phenomenology
of Spirit concerning the moment of recognition (Hegel 1977:111). There Hegel de-
scribes the movement in which self-consciousness produces itself by positing another
would be self-consciousness, not as a mute object (Gegen-stand) but as itself self-
consciousness. The Hegelian movement remains one of the most fascinating mo-
ments in the history of philosophy since it is for the first time that the constitution of
the self does not take place from within the self (as happens with Descartes, for whom
the only truth is the truth of my existence; or Leibniz, for whom the monads are ‘win-
dowless’; or Fichte, for whom the ‘I’ is absolutely self-constitutive) but from the out-
side. It is, Hegel tells us, only because someone else recognizes me as a subject that I
can be constituted as such. Outside the moment of recognition there is no self-con-
sciousness. De Beauvoir takes to heart the Hegelian lesson and tries to formulate an
ethics from it.

What would this ethics be? As in Nietzsche, ethics refers to a way of life (a βίος), as
opposed to morality which concerns approved or condemned behaviour. Thus there
are no recipes for ethics. Drawn from Hegel’s moment of recognition, de Beauvoir ac-
knowledges that the possibility of human flourishing is based firstly upon the recogni-
tion of the existence of the other (“Man can find a justification of his own existence
only in the existence of the other men” (Beauvoir 1976:72) and secondly on the recog-
nition that my own flourishing (or my ability to pose projects, in the language of exis-
tentialists) passes through the possibility of a common flourishing. “Only the freedom
of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity,” (Beauvoir
1976:71) de Beauvoir writes; or again “To will oneself free is also to will others free”
(Beauvoir 1976:73). The Ethics of Ambiguity ends by declaring the necessity of as-
suming one’s freedom and the assertion that it is only through action that freedom
makes itself possible. This is not a point to be taken light-heartedly. It constitutes a
movement of opposition against a long tradition of philosophy understanding itself as
theoria: the disinterested contemplation on the nature of the human and the world.
De Beauvoir, in common with most existentialists, understands philosophy as praxis:
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involved action in the world and participation in the course of history. It is out of this
understanding that The Second Sex is born.

In 1949 Le Deuxième Sexe is published in France. In English in 1953 it appeared as

The Second Sex in an abridged translation. The book immediately became a best
seller and later a founding text of Second Wave Feminism (the feminist movement
from the early 60’s to the 70’s inspired by the civil rights movement and focusing at
the theoretical examination of the concepts of equality, inequality, the role of family,
justice and so forth). More than anything, The Second Sex constitutes a study in ap-
plied existentialism where the abstract concept ‘Woman’ gives way to the examina-
tion of the lives of everyday persons struggling against oppression and humiliation.
When de Beauvoir says that there is no such thing as a ‘Woman’ we have to hear the
echo of the Kierkegaardian assertion of the single individual against the abstractions
of Hegelian philosophy, or similarly Sartre’s insistence on the necessity of the prioriti-
zation of the personal lives of self-creating people (what Sartre calls ‘existence’) as op-
posed to a pre-established ideal of what humans should be like (what Sartre calls ‘es-
sence’). The Second Sex is an exemplary text showing how a philosophical movement
can have real, tangible effects on the lives of many people, and is a magnificent exer-
cise in what philosophy could be.

“I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, es-
pecially for women…” (Beauvoir 2009:3). The Second Sex begins with the most obvi-
ous (but rarely posed) question: What is woman? De Beauvoir finds that at present
there is no answer to that question. The reason is that tradition has always thought of
woman as the other of man. It is only man that constitutes himself as a subject (as the
Absolute de Beauvoir says), and woman defines herself only through him. “She deter-
mines and differentiates herself in relation to man, and he does not in relation to her;
she is the inessential in front of the essential…” (Beauvoir 2009:6). But why is it that
woman has initially accepted or tolerated this process whereby she becomes the other
of man? De Beauvoir does not give a consoling answer; on the contrary, by turning to
Sartre’s notion of bad faith (which refers to the human being’s anxiety in front of the
responsibility entailed by the realization of its radical freedom) she thinks that
women at times are complicit to their situation. It is indeed easier for one – anyone –
to assume the role of an object (for example a housewife ‘kept’ by her husband) than
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to take responsibility for creating him or herself and creating the possibilities of free-
dom for others. Naturally the condition of bad faith is not always the case. Often
women found themselves in a sociocultural environment which denied them the very
possibility of personal flourishing (as happens with most of the major religious com-
munities). A further problem that women face is that of understanding themselves as
a unity which would enable them to assume the role of their choosing. “Proletarians
say ‘we’. So do blacks” (Beauvoir 2009:8). By saying ‘we’ they assume the role of the
subject and turn everyone else into ‘other’. Women are unable to utter this ‘we’. “They
live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests and social condi-
tions to certain men – fathers or husbands – more closely than to other women. As
bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women pro-
letarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black
women” (Beauvoir 2009:9). Women primarily align themselves to their class or race
and not to other women. The female identity is “very much bound up with the iden-
tity of the men around them…” (Reynolds 2006:145).

One of the most celebrated moments in The Second Sex is the much quoted phrase:
“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (Beauvoir 2009:293). She explains:
“No biological, physical or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female
takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary prod-
uct between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine” (Beauvoir 2009:293).
For some feminists this clearly inaugurates the problematic of the sex-gender distinc-
tion (where sex denotes the biological identity of the person and gender the cultural
attribution of properties to the sexed body). Simply put, there is absolutely nothing
that determines the ‘assumed’ femininity of the woman (how a woman acts, feels, be-
haves) – everything that we have come to think as ‘feminine’ is a social construction
not a natural given. Later feminists like Monique Wittig and Judith Butler will argue
that ‘sex’ is already ‘gender’ in the sense that a sexed body exists always already
within a cultural nexus that defines it. Thus the sex assignment (a doctor pronounc-
ing the sex of the baby) is a naturalized (but not at all natural) normative claim which
delivers the human into a world of power relations.

f. Albert Camus (1913-1960) as an Existentialist Philosopher

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Albert Camus was a French intellectual, writer and journalist. His multifaceted work
as well as his ambivalent relation to both philosophy and existentialism makes every
attempt to classify him a rather risky operation. A recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize
for Literature primarily for his novels, he is also known as a philosopher due to his
non-literary work and his relation with Jean-Paul Sartre. And yet his response was
clear: “I am not a philosopher, because I don’t believe in reason enough to believe in a
system. What interests me is knowing how we must behave, and more precisely, how
to behave when one does not believe in God or reason” (Camus in Sherman 2009: 1).
The issue is not just about the label ‘existentialist’. It rather points to a deep tension
within the current of thought of all thinkers associated with existentialism. The ques-
tion is: With how many voices can thought speak? As we have already seen, the
thinkers of existentialism often deployed more than one. Almost all of them share a
deep suspicion to a philosophy operating within reason as conceived of by the
Enlightenment. Camus shares this suspicion and his so called philosophy of the ab-
surd intends to set limits to the overambitions of Western rationality. Reason is ab-
surd in that it believes that it can explain the totality of the human experience
whereas it is exactly its inability for explanation that, for example, a moment of fall
designates. Thus in his novel “The Fall” the protagonist’s tumultuous narrative re-
veals the overtaking of a life of superficial regularity by the forces of darkness and ir-
rationality. “A bourgeois hell, inhabited of course by bad dreams” (Camus 2006:10).
In a similar fashion Camus has also repudiated his connection with existentialism.
“Non, je ne suis pas existentialist” is the title of a famous interview that he gave for
the magazine Les Nouvelles Littéraires on the 15 of November, 1945. The truth of the
matter is that Camus’ rejection of existentialism is directed more toward Sartre’s ver-
sion of it rather than toward a dismissal of the main problems that the existential
thinkers faced. Particularly, Camus was worried that Sartre’s deification of history
(Sartre’s proclaimed Marxism) would be incompatible with the affirmation of per-
sonal freedom. Camus accuses Hegel (subsequently Marx himself) of reducing man to
history and thus denying man the possibility of creating his own history, that is, af-
firming his freedom.

Philosophically, Camus is known for his conception of the absurd. Perhaps we should
clarify from the very beginning what the absurd is not. The absurd is not nihilism.
For Camus the acceptance of the absurd does not lead to nihilism (according to
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Nietzsche nihilism denotes the state in which the highest values devalue themselves)
or to inertia, but rather to their opposite: to action and participation. The notion of
the absurd signifies the space which opens up between, on the one hand, man’s need
for intelligibility and, on the other hand, ‘the unreasonable silence of the world’ as he
beautifully puts it. In a world devoid of God, eternal truths or any other guiding prin-
ciple, how could man bear the responsibility of a meaning-giving activity? The absurd
man, like an astronaut looking at the earth from above, wonders whether a philo-
sophical system, a religion or a political ideology is able to make the world respond to
the questioning of man, or rather whether all human constructions are nothing but
the excessive face-paint of a clown which is there to cover his sadness. This terrible
suspicion haunts the absurd man. In one of the most memorable openings of a non-
fictional book he states: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and
that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the
fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three
dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards.
These are games; one must first answer” (Camus 2000:11). The problem of suicide (a
deeply personal problem) manifests the exigency of a meaning-giving response.
Indeed for Camus a suicidal response to the problem of meaning would be the confir-
mation that the absurd has taken over man’s inner life. It would mean that man is not
any more an animal going after answers, in accordance with some inner drive that
leads him to act in order to endow the world with meaning. The suicide has become
but a passive recipient of the muteness of the world. “…The absurd … is simultane-
ously awareness and rejection of death” (Camus 2000:54). One has to be aware of
death – because it is precisely the realization of man’s mortality that pushes someone
to strive for answers – and one has ultimately to reject death – that is, reject suicide
as well as the living death of inertia and inaction. At the end one has to keep the ab-
surd alive, as Camus says. But what does it that mean?

In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus tells the story of the mythical Sisyphus who was con-
demned by the Gods to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain and then have
to let it fall back again of its own weight. “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless
and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks
of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time
crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” (Camus
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2000:109). One must imagine then Sisyphus victorious: fate and absurdity have been
overcome by a joyful contempt. Scorn is the appropriate response in the face of the
absurd; another name for this ‘scorn’ though would be artistic creation. When Camus
says: “One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of
happiness” (Camus 2000:110) he writes about a moment of exhilarated madness,
which is the moment of the genesis of the artistic work. Madness, but nevertheless
profound – think of the function of the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear as the one
who reveals to the king the most profound truths through play, mimicry and songs.
Such madness can overcome the absurd without cancelling it altogether.

Almost ten years after the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus Camus publishes his
second major philosophical work, The Rebel (1951). Camus continues the problematic
which had begun with The Myth of Sisyphus. Previously, revolt or creation had been
considered the necessary response to the absurdity of existence. Here, Camus goes on
to examine the nature of rebellion and its multiple manifestations in history. In The
Myth of Sisyphus, in truly Nietzschean fashion, Camus had said: “There is but one
useful action, that of remaking man and the earth” (Camus 2000:31). However, in
The Rebel, reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm, one of the first points he makes is
the following: “The slave starts by begging for justice and ends by wanting to wear a
crown. He too wants to dominate” (Camus 2000b:31). The problem is that while man
genuinely rebels against both unfair social conditions and, as Camus says, against the
whole of creation, nevertheless in the practical administration of such revolution,
man comes to deny the humanity of the other in an attempt to impose his own indi-
viduality. Take for example the case of the infamous Marquis de Sade which Camus
explores. In Sade, contradictory forces are at work (see The 120 Days of Sodom). On
the one hand, Sade wishes the establishment of a (certainly mad) community with
desire as the ultimate master, and on the other hand this very desire consumes itself
and all the subjects who stand in its way.

Camus goes on to examine historical manifestations of rebellion, the most prominent

case being that of the French Revolution. Camus argues that the revolution ended up
taking the place of the transcendent values which it sought to abolish. An all-powerful
notion of justice now takes the place formerly inhabited by God. Rousseau’s infamous
suggestion that under the rule of ‘general will’ everyone would be ‘forced to be free’
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(Rousseau in Foley 2008:61) opens the way to the crimes committed after the revolu-
tion. Camus fears that all revolutions end with the re-establishment of the State. “…
Seventeen eighty-nine brings Napoleon; 1848 Napoleon III; 1917 Stalin; the Italian
disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler” (Camus
2000b:146). Camus is led to examine the Marxist view of history as a possible re-
sponse to the failed attempts at the establishment of a true revolutionary regime.
Camus examines the similarities between the Christian and the Marxist conception of
history. They both exhibit a bourgeois preoccupation with progress. In the name of
the future everything can be justified: “the future is the only kind of property that the
masters willingly concede to the slaves” (Camus 2000b:162). History according to
both views is the linear progress from a set beginning to a definite end (the metaphys-
ical salvation of man or the materialistic salvation of him in the future Communist so-
ciety). Influenced by Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Camus interprets this future, classless
society as the ‘end of history’. The ‘end of history’ suggests that when all contradic-
tions cease then history itself will come to an end. This is, Camus argues, essentially
nihilistic: history, in effect, accepts that meaning creation is no longer possible and
commits suicide. Because historical revolutions are for the most part nihilistic move-
ments, Camus suggests that it is the making-absolute of the values of the revolution
that necessarily lead to their negation. On the contrary a relative conception of these
values will be able to sustain a community of free individuals who have not forgotten
that every historical rebellion has begun by affirming a proto-value (that of human
solidarity) upon which every other value can be based.

3. The Influence of Existentialism

a. The Arts and Psychology

In the field of visual arts existentialism exercised an enormous influence, most obvi-
ously on the movement of Expressionism. Expressionism began in Germany at the
beginning of the 20th century. With its emphasis on subjective experience, Angst and
intense emotionality, German expressionism sought to go beyond the naiveté of real-
ist representation and to deal with the anguish of the modern man (exemplified in the
terrible experiences of WWI). Many of the artists of Expressionism read Nietzsche in-
tensively and following Nietzsche’s suggestion for a transvaluation of values experi-

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mented with alternative lifestyles. Erich Heckel’s woodcut “Friedrich Nietzsche” from
1905 is a powerful reminder of the movement’s connection to Existentialist thought.
Abstract expressionism (which included artists such as de Kooning and Pollock, and
theorists such as Rosenberg) continued with some of the same themes in the United
States from the 1940s and tended to embrace existentialism as one of its intellectual
guides, especially after Sartre’s US lecture tour in 1946 and a production of No Exit in
New York.

German Expressionism was particularly important during the birth of the new art of
cinema. Perhaps the closest cinematic work to Existentialist concerns remains F.W.
Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) in which the constantly moving camera (which pre-
figures the ‘rule’ of the hand-held camera of the Danish Dogma 95) attempts to arrest
the spiritual anguish of a man who suddenly finds himself in a meaningless world.
Expressionism became a world-wide style within cinema, especially as film directors
like Lang fled Germany and ended up in Hollywood. Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour
(1950) is a moving poetic exploration of desire. In the sordid, claustrophobic cells of a
prison the inmates’ craving for intimacy takes place against the background of an un-
avoidable despair for existence itself. European directors such as Bergman and
Godard are often associated with existentialist themes. Godard’s Vivre sa vie (My Life
to Live, 1962) is explicit in its exploration of the nature of freedom under conditions
of extreme social and personal pressure. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries exis-
tentialist ideas became common in mainstream cinema, pervading the work of writers
and directors such as Woody Allen, Richard Linklater, Charlie Kaufman and
Christopher Nolan.

Given that Sartre and Camus were both prominent novelists and playwrights, the in-
fluence of existentialism on literature is not surprising. However, the influence was
also the other way. Novelists such as Dostoevsky or Kafka, and the dramatist Ibsen,
were often cited by mid-century existentialists as important precedents, right along
with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Dostoevsky creates a character Ivan Karamazov (in
The Brothers Karamazov, 1880) who holds the view that if God is dead, then every-
thing is permitted; both Nietzsche and Sartre discuss Dostoevsky with enthusiasm.
Within drama, the theatre of the absurd and most obviously Beckett were influenced

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by existentialist ideas; later playwrights such as Albee, Pinter and Stoppard continue
this tradition.

One of the key figures of 20th century psychology, Sigmund Freud, was indebted to
Nietzsche especially for his analysis of the role of psychology within culture and his-
tory, and for his view of cultural artefacts such as drama or music as ‘unconscious’
documentations of psychological tensions. But a more explicit taking up of existen-
tialist themes is found in the broad ‘existentialist psychotherapy’ movement. A com-
mon theme within this otherwise very diverse group is that previous psychology mis-
understood the fundamental nature of the human and especially its relation to others
and to acts of meaning-giving; thus also, previous psychology had misunderstood
what a ‘healthy’ attitude to self, others and meaning might be. Key figures here in-
clude Swiss psychologists Ludwig Binswanger and later Menard Boss, both of who
were enthusiastic readers of Heidegger; the Austrian Frankl, who invented the
method of logotherapy; in England, Laing and Cooper, who were explicitly influenced
by Sartre; and in the United States, Rollo May, who stresses the ineradicable impor-
tance of anxiety.

b. Philosophy
As a whole, existentialism has had relatively little direct influence within philosophy.
In Germany, existentialism (and especially Heidegger) was criticised for being ob-
scure, abstract or even mystical in nature. This criticism was made especially by
Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity, and in Dog Years, novelist Gunter Grass gives
a Voltaire-like, savage satire of Heidegger. The criticism was echoed by many in the
analytic tradition. Heidegger and the existentialist were also taken to task for paying
insufficient attention to social and political structures or values, with dangerous re-
sults. In France, philosophers like Sartre were criticised by those newly under the in-
fluence of structuralism for paying insufficient attention to the nature of language
and to impersonal structures of meaning. In short, philosophy moved on, and in dif-
ferent directions. Individual philosophers remain influential, however: Nietzsche and
Heidegger in particular are very much ‘live’ topics in philosophy, even in the 21st
century.

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However, there are some less direct influences that remain important. Let us raise
three examples. Both the issue of freedom in relation to situation, and that of the
philosophical significance of what otherwise might appear to be extraneous contex-
tual factors, remain key, albeit in dramatically altered formulation, within the work of
Michel Foucault or Alain Badiou, two figures central to late 20th century European
thought. Likewise, the philosophical importance that the existentialists placed upon
emotion has been influential, legitimising a whole domain of philosophical research
even by philosophers who have no interest in existentialism. Similarly, existentialism
was a philosophy that insisted philosophy could and should deal very directly with
‘real world’ topics such as sex, death or crime, topics that had most frequently been
approached abstractly within the philosophical tradition. Mary Warnock wrote on ex-
istentialism and especially Sartre, for example, while also having an incredibly impor-
tant and public role within recent applied ethics.

4. References and Further Reading

a. General Introductions
Warnock Mary. Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970)
Barrett William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Anchor House, 1990)
Cooper E. David. Existentialism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999)
Reynolds Jack. Understanding Existentialism (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2006)
Earnshaw Steven. Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006)

b. Anthologies
Kauffman Walter. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Penguin, 1975)
Paul S. MacDonald. The Existentialist Reader – An Anthology of Key Texts (Edinburgh: Edinburg University
Press, 2000)
Solomon C. Robert. Existentialism (USA: Oxford University Press, 2004)

c. Primary Bibliography
Beauvoir de Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press, 1976)
Beauvoir de Simone. The Second Sex (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009)
Camus Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 2000)
Camus Albert. The Rebel (London: Penguin, 2000b)

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Camus Albert. The Fall, (London: Penguin, 2006)

Heidegger Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Heaven & London: Yale University Press,2000)
Heidegger Martin. Letter on Humanism: in Heidegger Martin. Basic Writings, (London: Routledge, 1993)
Heidegger Martin. Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)
Heidegger Martin. Identity and Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002)
Kierkegaard Søren. The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
Kierkegaard Søren. Fear and Trembling (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983)
Kierkegaard Søren. Papers and Journals: A Selection, (London: Penguin Book, 1996)
Nietzsche Friedrich. Ecce Homo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Nietzsche Friedrich. The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Nietzsche Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Nietzsche Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Sartre Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (London and New York: Routledge, 2003)
Sartre Jean-Paul, “Intentionality: A fundamental idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Trans. by Joseph P.
Fell, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1970, Vol. 1, No. 2

d. Secondary Bibliography
Camus
Todd Oliver. Albert Camus – A Life (London: Vintage, 1998)
Sherman David. Camus (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009)
Foley John. Albert Camus – From the Absurd to Revolt (Stocksfield: Accumen, 2009)
Sartre
Cox Gary. Sartre – A guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006)
Gardner Sebastian. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (London: Continuum, 2009)
Stewart John, “Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Sartre’s theory of freedom.” Philosophy Today, 39:3 (1995:Fall)
Heidegger
Beistegui de Miguel. The New Heidegger (London & New York: Continuum, 2005)
Marx Werner. Heidegger and the Tradition (Evanson: Northwestern University Press, 1971)
Polt Richard. Heidegger – An Inroduction (London: UCL Press, 1999)
Safranski Rüdiger. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1999)
Watts Michael. The philosophy of Heidegger (Durham: Acumen, 2011)
Nietzsche
Ansell-Pearson Keith. An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994)
Burnham Douglas. Reading Nietzsche – An Analysis of Beyond Good an Evil (Stocksfield: Accumen, 2007)
Burnham Douglas and Jesinghausen Martin. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010)

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Burnham Douglas and Jesinghausen Martin. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (London: Continuum, 2010)
Safranski Rüdiger. Nietzsche – A Philosophical Biography (London: Granta Books, 2002)
Kierkegaard
Pattison George. The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Chesham: Acumen, 2005)
Weston Michael. Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge,
1994)

e. Other Works Cited

Hegel G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1977)
Spinoza Baruch Ethics in: Spinoza Baruch Complete Works, (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 2002)
Kant Immanuel An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Kant Immanuel Political Writings,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Author Information
Douglas Burnham
Email: [Link]@[Link]
Staffordshire University
United Kingdom

and

George Papandreopoulos
Email: [Link]@[Link]
Staffordshire University
United Kingdom

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