Page 227 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. .................... is the philosophy that places emphasis on individual existence, Freedom and
Choice.
2. The idea of the highest ethical good can be found in philosophy since the days of Socrates
and .................... .
3. .................... is also important to Existentialism.
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4. The early 19 century philosopher .................... is regarded as the Father of existentialism.
5. Existentialism is an extremely diverse and .................... .

30.2 History

Existentialism is foreshadowed most notably by 19th century philosophers Soren Kierkegaard
and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. In the 20th century, the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger influenced other existentialist philosophers such as Jean-
Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and (absurdist) Albert Camus. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz
Kafka also described existentialist themes in their literary works. Although there are some
common tendencies amongst “existentialist” thinkers, there are major differences and
disagreements among them (for example, the divide between atheist existentialists like Sartre
and theistic existentialists like Martin Buber and Paul Tillich); not all of them accept the validity
of the term as applied to their own work.

30.3 Origins

The term “existentialism” seems to have been coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel
in the mid-1940s and adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre who, on October 29, 1945, discussed his own
existentialist position in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris. The lecture was published as
L’existentialisme est un humanisme, a short book which did much to popularize existentialist
thought.
The label has been applied retrospectively to other philosophers for whom existence and, in
particular, human existence were key philosophical topics. Martin Heidegger had made human
existence (Dasein) the focus of his work since the 1920s, and Karl Jaspers had called his philosophy
“Existenzphilosophie” in the 1930s. Both Heidegger and Jaspers had been influenced by the
Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, the crisis of human existence had been
a major theme. He came to be regarded as the first existentialist, and has been called the “father
of existentialism”. In fact he was the first to explicitly make existential questions a primary focus
in his philosophy. In retrospect, other writers have also implicitly discussed existentialist themes
throughout the history of philosophy and literature. Due to the exposure of existentialist themes
over the decades, when society was officially introduced to existentialism, the term became
quite popular almost immediately.

30.4 Concepts

30.4.1 Focus on Concrete Existence

Existentialist thinkers focus on the question of concrete human existence and the conditions of
this existence rather than hypothesizing a human essence, stressing that the human essence is
determined through life choices. However, even though the concrete individual existence must
have priority in existentialism, certain conditions are commonly held to be “endemic” to human
existence.
What these conditions are is better understood in light of the meaning of the word “existence,”
which comes from the Latin “existere,” meaning “to stand out” (according to the OED, “existere”
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