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Unit 3: Literary Terms: Comedy of Manners, Absurd Theatre, and Existentialism

However, certain characterists that most existentialists seem to share may help understand this Notes
term. There are certain questions that everyone must deal with—death, the meaning of human
existence, the place of God in human existence, the meaning of value, interpersonal relationship,
the place of self-reflective conscious knowledge of one’s self in existing. By and large existentialists
believe that life is very difficult and that it doesn’t have an “objective” or universally known value,
but that the individual must create value by affiriming it and living it, not by talking about it.
However, in general the Existentialists recognize that human knowledge is limited and fallible.
One can be deeply committed to truth and investigation and simply fail to find adequate truth, or
get it wrong. Further, unlike science, which can keep searching for generations for an answer and
afford to just say: We don’t know yet, in the everyday world, we often simply must do or not do.
The moment of decision comes. For the Existentialist one faces these moments of decision with a
sense of fallibility and seriousness of purpose, and then risks. Sartre is extremely harsh on this
point. At one place he says: When I choose I choose for the whole world. What can this mean? Sartre
may mean by it that first of all when I choose and act, I change the world in some iota. This note gets
written or it doesn’t. That has ramifications. It commits one to say what one is saying. It may change
someone who may be affected by these remarks. Others can be too if they hear or read them. And so
on. The ripples of actions are like ripples on the sea, they go on and on and on.

3.3.2 Origin of Existentialism

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 Soren
Kierkegaard. 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.

3.3.3 History of Existentialism

The early 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of
existentialism. He maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life
meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles
and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom. Another notable
proponent of existentialism was Friedrich Nietzsche.
In the 20th century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger influenced other existentialist
philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and 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; not all of them accept the validity of the term as applied to their own work.

3.3.4 Concepts of Existentialism

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

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