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

existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the Notes
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”.

Existentialism is sometimes referred to as a continental philosophy, referring to
the continental part of Europe, as opposed to that practiced in Britain at that time, which
was called analytic philosophy, and mostly dealt with analyzing language.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
21. Existentialism is the philosophy that places emphasis on
(a) individual existence, freedom, and choice
(b) individual existence and freedom
(c) freedom and choice
(d) individual existence and choice.
22. Which of the following is important to existentialism?
(a) Subjectivity and actions
(b) Subjectivity, passionate choice and actions
(c) Subjectivity and passionate choice
(d) Passionate choice and actions.

23. A central proposition of existentialism is that
(a) essence preceded existence
(b) existence preceeds self
(c) existence precedes essence
(d) existence preceeds both self and essence.

Fill in the blanks:
24. The theme of ......... is common to many existentialist thinkers.
25. Despair in ......... is more specifically related to the reaction to a breakdown in one
or more of the defining qualities of one’s self.
26. The inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one’s..........
27. The theme of death follows along with the theme of ..........
State whether the following statements are true or false:
28. Humans exist in a state of distance from the world that they nonetheless remain in
the midst of.

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