Existentialism

Why did existentialism captivate the post-war generation?

In a France that had lived through the Second World War and the Nazi occupation, the sense that neither God nor historical necessity would save humanity was not abstract philosophy but everyday experience. Existentialism asked, in exactly that situation, "what then do human beings live by?" Its answer: since human beings have no essence fixed in advance, each becomes himself or herself through choice and action. That freedom is a liberation and at the same time a heavy responsibility.

The idea spread to a mass public through novels, plays and café debate. For a decade or so from around 1945 the cafés and jazz clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris became the emblem of "the existentialist", and Sartre's Nausea, Camus's The Stranger and The Plague and Beauvoir's The Second Sex were read as the movement's representative works. In post-war France, where the communist movement was strong, existentialism both competed with Marxism for the allegiance of intellectuals and talked with it.

What does "existence precedes essence" mean?

The word existentialism was coined in the mid-1940s by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Sartre at first rejected the label, but on 29 October 1945, in a lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris, he adopted it publicly, and the lecture, published the next year as Existentialism Is a Humanism, made existentialism known to a wide public. There Sartre divided Christian existentialists (Jaspers, Marcel) from atheist ones (Heidegger and himself) and said that what they share is that "existence precedes essence", that is, "one must start from subjectivity".

Ce qu'ils ont en commun, c'est simplement le fait qu'ils estiment que l'existence précède l'essence, ou, si vous voulez, qu'il faut partir de la subjectivité.

He took the example of a paper knife. A craftsman made it with the concept "paper knife" and its use in mind, so its essence comes before its existence. But if there is no God, there is no craftsman who designed human beings in advance. Man exists first, turns up in the world, and only afterwards defines himself. Hence Sartre wrote: "man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism." In the lecture's famous phrase, man is "condemned to be free": condemned because he did not create himself, free because once thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does.

l'homme n'est rien d'autre que ce qu'il se fait. Tel est le premier principe de l'existentialisme.

The theoretical foundation of this view is Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre distinguished consciousness, which goes beyond itself (being-for-itself), from things that merely are (being-in-itself), and called the attitude of treating oneself as a thing in flight from freedom "bad faith" (mauvaise foi). In The Second Sex (1949) Beauvoir used the same framework for the analysis that "one is not born, but becomes, a woman", showing that what had passed for woman's "essence" was socially made.

Where do Nietzsche and German philosophy of existence stand?

The name existentialism arose in the mid-twentieth century, but its roots are traced to Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth. Neither used the word, yet both criticised systematic reason for missing the concrete life of the individual and confronted the loss of meaning head on. Nietzsche's "death of God" in particular became existentialism's point of departure: in a world from which God has vanished, human beings must create values themselves. When Sartre starts his argument from the supposition "if God does not exist", he is taking up the question Nietzsche posed.

In Germany the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, "philosophy of existence" (Existenzphilosophie). Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) analysed the human being as Dasein and introduced concepts such as anxiety, being-towards-death and thrownness, which Sartre borrowed heavily. Yet in a letter to Jean Beaufret in 1946, later published as the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger distanced himself, implying that Sartre had misread him as a philosophy of subjectivity. Albert Camus, too, did not consider himself an existentialist and put forward his own thought of the absurd and of revolt. Existentialism is thus less a school than a broad current that gathers even those who refused the name.

How did Marxism view existentialism?

Sartre's 1945 lecture was itself a reply to communist criticism. At the outset he listed the charges that existentialism was a quietism of despair that made action impossible and so led back to a bourgeois philosophy, and that by starting from the subjectivity of the isolated individual it missed human solidarity, noting that "these are above all the reproaches of the communists". Intellectuals close to the French Communist Party saw existentialism as the philosophy of a defeated petty bourgeoisie, and in the discussion after the lecture the Marxist Pierre Naville criticised Sartre.

Ce sont surtout là les reproches des communistes.

The Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács rebutted existentialism in Existentialism or Marxism?, published in French in 1948. For Lukács existentialism was the thought of a bourgeois intelligentsia in crisis, turning away from objective history and fleeing into the inner life of the isolated individual, and he linked it to the genealogy of German irrationalism he later treated in The Destruction of Reason (1954).

But the relation was not only hostile. Sartre acted as a fellow traveller of the Communist Party in the 1950s, and in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he tried to reconcile existentialism and Marxism. In "Search for a Method", the book's introductory essay, he called Marxism the unsurpassable philosophy of our time and placed existentialism within it as an "ideology" that restores the living individual. In 1960s France this attempt drew fierce criticism from structuralism and from Althusser's "theoretical anti-humanism", and post-structuralism grew out of that debate.