EXISTENTIALISM

Jana Ghandour 11930192

The Card Players by Paul Cézanne

“5 versions of The Card Players, all towards the end of his life, and each of the pictures might
serve as an opening on to a theme of Existentialism”

PHIL200
FINAL PROJECT
Contents
What is Existentialism? ...................................................................................................................3

History of Existentialism ...............................................................................................................3

Key Themes of Existentialism ........................................................................................................4

A. Anxiety and Authenticity ...................................................................................................4

B. Absurdity or Irrationality ...................................................................................................5

C. Freedom ..............................................................................................................................5

Who are the Existentialist Philosophers? ........................................................................................5

A. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) ........................................................................................5

B. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) .......................................................................................6

What is the Influence of Existentialism? ........................................................................................6

In our adolescents, our young adulthood and most notoriously during middle age you think about
some questions. Maybe after you have just climbed a beautiful mountain and you are looking out
across the beautiful view or just sitting in your room starring at the roof. This is a question that
has haunted humans for thousands of years. What is my purpose? Why am I here? What are the
universal human rights? Is there a God? That is why some people named the existentialists
started considering the meaning of “existence”.

What is Existentialism?

Existentialism is a contemporary trend in the sphere of philosophy that deals with human
freedom, it emphasizes action and decision as fundamental to human existence; and is essentially
opposed to the rationalist tradition and to positivism. Therefore, it views that humans define their
own meaning in life and try to make rational decisions despite the irrational world they live in.
Existentialism lays stress on the question of human existence to the feeling that there is no
purpose to this existence. Jean-Paul Sartre a French philosopher believed that human existence is
the result of chance or accident. Hence, there is no meaning or purpose of our lives other than
what our freedom creates, therefore, we must rely on our own resources. He says that
existentialism does not aim at dropping us into despair: its final goal is to prepare us through
anguish, abandonment and despair for a genuine life, and it is basically concerned with the
human condition as a complete form of choice. Adding up, Existentialism focuses on the idea
that there is no God or any other transcendent force, so the only way to counter this nothingness
is by embracing existence and by finding the meaning of life. Thus, Existentialists believes that
each individual have full freedom although it might give humans anxiety because the higher
responsibility for themselves comes the higher level of anxiety.

“The pursuit of being leads to an awareness of nothingness, nothingness to an awareness of

freedom, freedom to bad faith and bad faith to the being of consciousness which provides the
condition for its own possibility”. Existentialist thought concerns itself with trying to understand
fundamentals of the human condition and its relation to the world around us. In addition,
Existentialism can be seen as a philosophical movement that rejects that life has an inherent
meaning, and views human existence as having a set of underlying themes and characteristics.
Such as anxiety, freedom, awareness of death and consciousness of existing that are primary.
That is, they cannot be explained by a natural-scientific approach and are seen as being of
supreme importance, and initially above all other scientific and philosophical pursuits.

History of Existentialism

Existentialism first started to appear in early Buddhist and Christian writings. In the 17th
century, Blaise Pascal proposed that, without a God life would be meaningless, boring and
miserable which what some Existentialists believed later. Nowadays, Existentialism is
recognized as a European philosophy that began in the mid-19th and 20th centuries and became
popular following the horrific years of World War II, when many began to doubt the traditional
idea of a moral deity based on the terrifying atrocities committed during the war. It was
originated in the 19th century with two philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche,
were they both felt that life is irrational. They are often grouped together as some of the first
thinkers in what would become existential philosophy because they were problem thinkers who
chose not to follow the systematic approach to philosophy as their predecessors did. Both
realized that no system of philosophy operates in isolation of its creators inherent prejudices.
Other philosophers such as, Jean-Paul Sartre a French existentialism in the 1940s and 1950s,
started exploring the harmony between the feeling of ‘anxiety’ and freedom, then Albert Camus
(1913 - 1960) stated that individuals should embrace the ‘absurd’ condition of human existence.
Lastly, Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986) maintains the existentialist belief in absolute
‘freedom’ of choice and the consequent responsibility that such freedom entails. They all wrote
scholarly and fictional works that popularized existential themes, such as anxiety, boredom,
alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment and nothingness. In addition, Existentialism came
to its peak in mid-20th century France, through fictional work of Jean-Paul so, some believe the
first philosopher to have actually identified as an existentialist is probably Jean-Paul. While
stating that “what all existentialists have in common is the fundamental doctrine that existence
precedes essence." What he means by this is that, we are all born without any kind of collective
purpose. We are born independent individuals rather than the labels, stereotypes, etc. that society
or our family decide to put on us. Our purpose or essence as Jean- Paul described is not what
others place on to us, but instead our purpose is to create through our own consciousness.

Key Themes of Existentialism

A. Anxiety and Authenticity

One very important theme of existentialism is anxiety which stems from our understanding
and recognition of the total freedom of choice that confronts us every moment, and the
individual’s confrontation with nothingness. Anxiety here has two main implications. First,
many existentialists tended to stress the significance of emotions or feelings, as they were
presumed to have a less culturally or intellectually mediated relation to one’s individual and
separate existence. Humans experience anxiety, stress and strife simply because of existence.
Soren Kierkegaard provides insight to the topic of anxiety describing it as the “dizziness of
freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down
into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself”, simply meaning anxiety
make us afraid of things we can’t pinpoint and thus we can’t avoid so it captures our
freedom. Also, Sartre proposed the idea that we experience anguish and anxiety when going
through transitions in our life. Second, anxiety also stands for a form of existence that is
recognition of being “on its own”, its meaning varies among philosophers. It might mean the
irrelevance of rational thought, moral values or empirical evidence, when it comes to making
fundamental decisions concerning one’s existence. Therefore, being on its own might signify
the uniqueness of human existence, and thus the fact that it cannot understand itself in terms
of other kinds of existence.
Related to anxiety is the concept of authenticity, which is in Greek notion of ‘the good life’.
The authentic being would be able to recognize and affirm the nature of existence as an
intellectual fact, disengaged from life; but rather, the authentic being lives in accordance with
this nature. Certainly, if authenticity involves ‘being on one’s own’, then there would seem to
be some kind of value in celebrating and sustaining one’s independence from others.
 However, many existentialists such as Nietzsche or political value, see individualism as a
historical and cultural trend rather than a necessary component of authentic existence.

B. Absurdity or Irrationality
Second theme is Albert Camus’ and Sartre’s idea of absurdity. This is the idea that we, as
human beings, are thrown into a life and time with no meaning to inherit value. In absurdist
philosophy, it comes from the fundamental disharmony between the individual’s search for
meaning and meaningless of our universe. Camus stated that individuals should embrace the
absurdity of human existence yet continue to explore and search for meaning in life. In
addition, absurd can be defined as: “freedom will not only be undetermined by knowledge or
reason, but from the point of view of the latter freedom will even appear absurd”. Thus
absurdity is closely related to the theme of ‘being on its own’. Also, absurdity could mean
that human existence as action is doomed to always destroy itself, therefore, a free action,
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 free existence should be a thing and
humans must be what they are not (a thing). Sartre’s formulation suggested “If I do not face
up to this absurdity, and choose to be or pretend to be thing-like, I exist in authentically”.

C. Freedom
Freedom can usefully be linked to the concept of anguish, because freedom is in part defined
by the isolation of decisions from any determination by a god, or by previously existent
values or knowledge. Freedom entails something like responsibility, for myself and for my
actions. Given that the situation is one of being on its own, recognized in anxiety then both
freedom and responsibility are absolute. The isolation means that there is nothing else that
acts through someone, or that shoulders anyone’s responsibility. Thus, when human exist as
an authentically free being, they assume they are responsible for their whole life, for a
‘project’ or a ‘commitment’. Noting that many of the existentialists take on a broadly
Kantian notion of freedom: freedom as ‘autonomy’. This means that freedom, rather than
being randomness, consists in the binding of oneself to a law, but a law that is given by the
self in recognition of its responsibilities.

Who are the Existentialist Philosophers?

A. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Soren was a profound writer in the Danish “golden age” of intellectual and artistic activity.
His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism,
devotional literature, and fiction. Soren was generally considered the father of existentialism
because; he was the first modern philosopher to explore several of the themes that would
eventually characterize the existentialist movement in philosophy in the first half of the 20th
century. So, some of the ideas from Kierkegaard’s thoughts that he developed to present and
are associated with existentialism are the primacy of the individual above any abstract, the
determinate nature of human existence, or its essential character as a “being in the world”,
and the inherently problematic nature of human existence because it involves uncertainty and
 risks, resulting in all-pervading feelings of fear, anxiety, and dread. Adding up, him being
born in Copenhagen to a wealthy family enabled him to devote his life to the pursuits of his
intellectual interests as well as to distancing himself from the ‘everyday man’ of his times.
Soren peculiar authorship comprises a baffling array of different narrative points of view and
disciplinary subject matter, including aesthetic novels, philosophical scraps and postscripts,
edifying discourses and retrospective self-interpretations.

B. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nietzsche was a German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic whose writings reflected
ideas of morality, religion, and science and were published intensively in the 1870s and
1880s. He was famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional European morality and
religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas, social and political pieties associated
with modernity. Therefore, his writings on truth, morality, language, aesthetics, cultural
theory, history, consciousness, and the meaning of existence have exerted an enormous
influence on Western philosophy and intellectual history. Many of these criticisms rely on
psychological diagnoses that expose false consciousness infecting people’s received ideas;
for that reason, he is often associated with a group of late modern thinkers who advanced a
“hermeneutics of suspicion” against traditional values. Furthermore, Nietzsche philosophy is
mainly referred to as existentialism because it focused on man’s existential situation. In his
works, Nietzsche questioned the basis of good and evil as he believed that heaven was an
unreal place or “the world of ideas”. Therefore, he exposed his ideas of atheism when he
spoke of “the death of God,” and foresaw the dissolution of traditional religion and
metaphysics. By that, he rejected philosophical reasoning, and promoted a literary
exploration of the human condition. Hence, Nietzsche claimed that the standard human being
must craft his/her own identity through self-realization and do so without relying on anything
transcending in life such as God or a soul.

What is the Influence of Existentialism?

Existentialism influenced the arts and psychology especially during the movement of
Expressionism which is a modernist movement that emerged in early 20th-century Germany. In a
nutshell, Existentialism is a philosophy which claims that there is no god, morality is relative,
and that meaning comes from the individual rather than a higher power. And it is important
because it states that our lives have no inherent meaning or purpose, but rather it is the purpose
we create for our lives that gives them a sense of meaning. Therefore, once we accept this as a
fact, we can live our lives freely, doing what we enjoy, without thinking about the society
standards. However, some might get influenced and think only in our present consciousness and
the universe, or god, doesn’t care what you’re doing. This shows us that there is no moral code
present in the universe by which to abide, we have complete control over what we decide to do.

I believe Existentialism’s goal is to expand your mind and to expose you to new ideas and
viewpoints. It is achieved by providing people with a unique way to view reality through which
is why movies, art, music, or literature is created. Existentialism challenges people’s intuitions
and makes them grow intellectually as a person by allowing them to select their own life path.
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