Existentialism

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Existentialism

Existentialism defies definition. Its most prominent representatives would rather say "I am I" than "I am an existentialist," because they see categorization as a betrayal of reality. Yet existentialism is a recognizable force in the modern world. A prominent philosophy, it has been an equally powerful movement in fiction, the theater, the visual arts, and music.

Existentialism explores human existence in its hopes and fears, its fragility, its conflicts and insecurities. Its vocabulary emphasizes freedom, angst (anxiety, anguish, dread), and absurdity. It sees reliance on pleasure, contentment, economic success, and security as a shallow, inauthentic existence.

The great personality at its source was the Danish Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). He cherished Socrates, the "gadfly" of Athens, and the Bible, especially the story of Abraham and Isaac, the Psalms, and the record of Jesus. His younger contemporaries Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), although they did not know of Kierkegaard, were major movers in existentialism.

Kierkegaard, a witty man-about-town, enjoyed café life and the theater but believed that the aesthetic and even the ethical levels of life were inadequate. For true existence he urged a "leap of faith," a venturing far out on seventy thousand fathoms of water, trusting for security not the nearness of shore but the buoyancy of the sea.

That led to the great divide in existentialism: between believers and atheists. Nietzsche declared the death of God, killed by human beings in an act that led Nietzsche both to shudder and to exult. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was not quite an atheist; he described himself as "waiting" for God. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, prominent French existentialists, were atheists. There were many other divisions among existentialists. If Kierkegaard was an individualist, the Jewish Martin Buber and the Roman Catholic Gabriel Marcel emphasized the social nature of selfhood. Some existentialists have been metaphysical skeptics; others have been concerned with the nature of "Being." Some, in their concentration on selfhood, have been apolitical; others have made deep commitments, wise or foolish, in political struggles. Existentialism does not represent consensus; it rebels against anything that obscures the absurdities of life and the radical commitments of authentic existence.

Kierkegaard declared that "truth is subjectivity." This was no quarrel with the objectivity of the multiplication tables or the findings of science. His point was that abstract truth is no answer to the fears and longings of the human person. Only when truth evokes loyalty and commitment does it rescue persons from triviality and frustration.

Existentialism arrived late in America. Kierkegaard was not published in English until the rush of translations beginning in 1936. He had already won some influence through the German theologian Karl Barth. Barth later turned away from existentialism toward a neo-Calvinism, but Rudolf Bultmann then became an influential existentialist voice in theology.

Following World War II, which blasted many of the assurances of Americans, existentialism made a powerful impact in the United States. The Niebuhr brothers (Reinhold and H. Richard) and Paul Tillich appropriated existentialist themes and gave them original interpretations. Many colleges and little theaters produced Sartre's one-act play No Exit, and his fiction and other dramas aroused wide interest. Camus's essays and fiction earned acclaim. (Both Sartre and Camus won Nobel prizes in literature, although Sartre, with characteristic contempt for established authority, rejected his.) Existential psychology earned considerable interest; Kierkegaard had anticipated, in some ways, Freud's exploration of the unconscious and the human id, although existentialist psychologists emphasized human freedom as against Freud's near-determinism. The "theater of the absurd" expressed existentialist themes, except when it portrayed persons as victims rather than as free agents.

Existentialist music and art are impossible to define, but unmistakable. Beethoven's late quartets have been described as existentialist. Tillich, in an essay "Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art," hailed Picasso's Guernica as "the best Protestant religious picture" because "it shows the human situation without any cover." This is not to say that Beethoven or Picasso discovered existentialism and applied it to art; it is to say that the cultural forces that led to verbal expressions of existentialism also produced great art.

The faddist stage of existentialism has faded, but many of its insights have entered the mainstream of theology and culture: its insistence that authoritative doctrine is no substitute for commitment; its attacks on cults of peace of mind, positive thinking, and self-esteem; its warning against religion that supports the idols of culture. There is wide belief that existentialism, whatever its excesses, recognizes insights of biblical faith that must be reappropriated perennially in the histories of Judaism and Christianity.