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History of English Literature

Notes a hopeless state. For example, an athlete who loses his legs in an accident may despair if he has
nothing else to fall back on, nothing on which to rely for his identity. He finds himself unable to
be that which defined his being.
What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the dictionary definition is that
existentialist despair is a state one is in even when they aren’t overtly in despair. So long as a
person’s identity depends on qualities that can crumble, they are considered to be in perpetual
despair. And as there is, in Sartrean terms, no human essence found in conventional reality on
which to constitute the individual’s sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition. As
Kierkegaard defines it in his either/or: “Any life-view with a condition outside it is despair.” In
other words, it is possible to be in despair without despairing.

30.4.8 Reason

Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose themselves to
rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue against definitions of human beings as primarily
rational. Rather, existentialists look at where people find meaning. Existentialism asserts that
people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them rather than rationally. The rejection
of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on
the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our
awareness of death. Kierkegaard saw strong rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter
their existential anxiety, their fear of being in the world: “If I can believe that I am rational and
everyone else is rational then I have nothing to fear and no reason to feel anxious about being
free.” However, Kierkegaard advocated rationality as means to interact with the objective world
(e.g. in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems, reason is insufficient:
“Human reason has boundaries”.
Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of “bad faith”, an
attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — “the Other” — that is
fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad
faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress their feelings of anxiety
and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserts, thereby
relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by “the
Look” of “the Other” (i.e. possessed by another person — or at least one’s idea of that other
person). In a similar vein, Camus believed that society and religion falsely teach humans that
“the other” has order and structure. For camus, when an individual’s consciousness, longing for
order, collides with the Other’s lack of order, a third element is born: absurdity.

Task Write a short note on Existentialism.

30.5 Summary

Existentialism is foreshadowed most notably by 19th century philosophers Soren
Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries.
Existentialist thinkers focus on the question of concrete human existence and the condi-
tions of this existence rather than hypothesizing a human essence, stressing that the human
essence is determined through life choices.
A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that
the actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called his or her “essence”
instead of there being a predetermined essence that defines what it is to be a human.
“Existential” Angst, sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish is a term that is
common to many existentialist thinkers.

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