Thomas Flynn - Existentialism

EXISTENTIALISM IS COMMONLY associated with Left-Bank Parisian cafs and the family of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who gathered there in the years immediately following the liberation of Paris at the end of World War II. One imagines offbeat, avant-garde intellectuals, attached to their cigarettes, listening to jazz as they hotly debate the implications of their newfound political and artistic liberty. The mood is one of enthusiasm, creativity, anguished self-analysis, and freedomalways freedom.

Though this reflects the image projected by the media of the day and doubtless captures the spirit of the time, it glosses over the philosophical significance of existentialist thought, packaging it as a cultural phenomenon of a certain historical period. That is perhaps the price paid by a manner of thinking so bent on doing philosophy concretely rather than in some abstract and timeless manner. The existentialists urge for contemporary relevance fired their social and political commitment. But it also linked them with the problems of their day and invited subsequent generations to view them as having the currency of yesterdays news.

Such is the misreading of existentialist thought that I hope to correct in this volume. If it bears the marks of its postwar appearance, existentialism as a manner of doing philosophy and a way of addressing the issues that matter in peoples lives is at least as old as philosophy itself. It is as current as the human condition which it examines. To ensure at the outset that this point is not lost, I begin my initial chapter with a discussion of philosophy, not as a doctrine or a system of thought but as a way of life. The title of comes from classical scholar Pierre Hadots study of the return to the Stoics as an example of how ancient philosophy can offer meaning to peoples lives even in our day. Though his preference is for the Greeks and Romans, Hadot finds a similar concern in the writings of Sren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, the so-called nineteenth-century fathers of the existentialist movement, and among their twentieth-century progeny.

It is commonly acknowledged that existentialism is a philosophy about the concrete individual. This is both its glory and its shame. In an age of mass communication and mass destruction, it is to its credit that existentialism defends the intrinsic value of what its main proponent Sartre calls the free organic individual, that is, the flesh-and-blood agent. Because of the almost irresistible pull toward conformity in modern society, what we shall call existential individuality is an achievement, and not a permanent one at that. We are born biological beings but we must become existential individuals by accepting responsibility for our actions. This is an application of Nietzsches advice to become what you are. Many people never do acknowledge such responsibility but rather flee their existential individuality into the comfort of the faceless crowd. As an object lesson in becoming an individual, in the following chapter, I trace what Kierkegaard calls spheres of or stages on lifes way and conclude with some observations about how Nietzsche would view this project of becoming an existential individual.

Shortly after the end of the war, Sartre delivered a public lecture entitled Is Existentialism a , I discuss the implications of that problematic lecture, the only one Sartre ever regretted publishing, as well as his contemporary Martin Heideggers response in his famous Letter on Humanism.

While the supreme value of existentialist thought is commonly acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is is devoted to this topic as well as to the nature and forms of self-deception, or bad faith, that function as its contrary. I relate authenticity to existential individuality and consider the possibility of an ethics of authenticity based on existential responsibility.

In order to counter the criticism, widespread immediately after the war, that existentialism is simply another form of bourgeois individualism, bereft of collective consciousness and indifferent to the need to address the social issues of the day, I devote to the issue of a chastened individualism, as the existentialists try to conceive of social solidarity in a manner that will enhance rather than compromise individual freedom and responsibility, which remain nonnegotiable.

In the last chapter, I draw on the foregoing as well as on other aspects of existentialist thought to consider the continued relevance of existentialist philosophy in our day. It is necessary to separate the philosophical significance of the movement, its powerful insights, and its attention to the concrete, from the arresting but now dated trappings of its Left-Bank adolescence. From many likely candidates, I choose four topics of current interest to which the existentialists have something of philosophical import to say.

Two features of this brief volume may perhaps strike the reader as limitations even in an introduction: the number of commonly recognized existentialist names that are absent and, at the other extreme, the possibly excessive presence of Jean-Paul Sartre throughout the work. Regarding the first, though I could have mentioned, for example, Dostoevsky or Kafka, Giacometti or Picasso, Ionesco or Beckett, all powerful exemplars of existentialist themes in the arts, my concern is to treat existentialism as a philosophical movement with artistic implications rather than as (just) a literary movement with philosophical pretensionswhich is a common though misguided conception. The reason for not discussing Buber or Berdaiev, Ortega y Gasset or Unamuno, and many other philosophers deserving of mention here, is that this is an introduction, after all. Those interested in pursuing the topics discussed here will find suggestions of useful sources at the end of the book.