16 A–Z Glossary

Abbagnano

Nicola Abbagnano (1901–1990) was an Italian philosopher who played an

important role in the introduction of existentialism to Italy. His writings in the
1930s present an account of philosophy as a search for Being and, at the same
time, a rejection of both Heidegger’s definition of authentic existence as ‘being-
towards-death’ and Jaspers’s conception of Being as unattainable, which Abba-
gnano regarded as marked with ‘dread’ and ‘failure’ respectively. Conversely,
Abbagnano proposed what he called positive existentialism, that is, a philosoph-
ical approach that emphasizes the notion of possibility, while at the same time
stressing human finitude. During the 1940s, he focused on science, asserting its
cognitive value and suggesting an account of philosophy as epistemological
enquiry able to complement science. Subsequently, he relied on Dewey’s prag-
matism and on neopositivism to support the idea of a ‘new Enlightenment’, a
revaluation of reason considered ‘as a human force endeavouring to make the
world more human’. However, he later considered the new Enlightenment a
failure because of the success of Marxism (which he regarded as a development
of idealism), and he developed an increasing interest in the contribution that
philosophy can offer to the solution of everyday problems. From 1936 to 1976
he taught history of philosophy at the University of Turin. His essays on art,
science, sociology, and so on, are collated in several books, including Il problema
dell’arte (1925), La Fisica Nuova (1934), La struttura dell’Esistenza (1939), Esisten-
zialismo Positivo (1948) and Possibilità e Libertà (1956). He was also the author of
an excellent history of philosophy textbook, used by several generations of stu-
dents in Italy.
Paolo Diego Bubbio

Absurdity

Absurdity is a key notion in the early thought and literature of Camus. By

the absurd, Camus did not mean to express the nihilistic view that human
life or experience is meaningless. Camus’s notion of absurdity aims to
describe the human predicament as he saw it, or, as he later commented, as

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his generation found it in the streets. This is a predicament wherein humans

find themselves torn between an ineradicable desire for a unified explanation
for their experiences, and the unavailability of such an explanation. This
absurdity confronts us in a host of experiences Camus describes in The Myth
of Sisyphus (1942) and dramatizes in The Outsider (1942) and the early play
Caligula (1958/1944). These include, most prominently, facing one’s own
mortality, but Camus cites a host of other manifestations of the absurd, from
not recognizing oneself momentarily in one’s mirror image, to the inescap-
ably metaphoric nature of even the most advanced scientific notions.
Significantly, Camus denies that the ‘decent’ or truthful response to absur-
dity involves despair or suicide, or licenses philosophical positions (like
those he attributes to Kierkegaard or Chestov) that celebrate the arationality
of the human condition. The flipside of rationalist denials of our inability to
account for the whole (in this camp Camus places Plato, Husserl, and others),
such positions involve what he terms a ‘leap’ out of the absurd predicament,
by denying one of its poles (the drive to a unified meaning, or the impossibil-
ity of such unity). Living with the absurd involves what Camus terms a ‘ten-
sion’ or ‘rebellion’ against the inescapable temptation of making such leaps
into total explanations. In his early work, this leads to a ‘quantitative’ aesthet-
ics of living, which would multiply experiences in full awareness of their
transitoriness (the actor, Don Juan, the conqueror). After 1941 and Camus’s
involvement in the French resistance, it becomes the basis for his post-nihilis-
tic political ethics of human solidarity founded on the impossibility of giving
a defensible, post-religious justification for murder.
Mathew Sharpe

Ambiguity

In de Beauvoir’s work ‘ambiguity’ describes the nature of human existence,

which is characterized by an irreducible tension and irrevocable connection
between our ontological freedom (our transcendence) and our ‘embeddedness’
in the world (our facticity). This means that, while being ultimately ‘free’ from
any fixed or inherent ‘nature’ that might exhaustively define us, we are at the
same time situated and embodied beings whose materiality is significant to (and
affected by) our experience of the world (our history, social location, age, sex,
class, etc.) and the others with whom we share this world.
The term ‘ambi’ means an ‘encompassing of both’, or, ‘being both ways’.
Encapsulated in the term ambiguity is our existence as both self and other,
subject and object, a life that is dying from the moment of conception. In The
Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), de Beauvoir’s description of the constant play and
tension between what are usually seen as mutually exclusive facets of our

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being has led to what is often seen as a contradiction in her account of free-
dom and existence. This is because she argues that we are always ontologi-
cally free (we have no essence that determines us) but at the same time we are
always situated – historically, physically, temporally and psychologically
located – in the world with others, which impacts upon our practical freedom
and our capacity to act. De Beauvoir does not want us to try to ‘overcome’ this
tension, however, but to accept it in order to live authentically.
Our ethical actions should be based on a willingness to engage with this
ambiguity, to maintain the tension that ambiguity implies, and to ensure
that others also have the opportunity to engage with their freedom by refus-
ing to see them as ‘things’. The maintenance of this tension is crucial to de
Beauvoir’s ethics and she argues that it needs to be preserved rather than
collapsed, both in a theoretical account of ethics and in our practical relation
to the world. Neither the transcendent nor the immanent aspect of human
existence should be privileged, and the indeterminacy and lack of clarity
that ambiguous phenomena are traditionally condemned for become char-
acteristics that are celebrated in an ethics that has its foundations in the
acknowledgement of paradox and tension. In Phenomenology of Perception
(1945), Merleau-Ponty also offers a sustained account of the necessary ambi-
guity of embodied subjectivity, with some related ethical implications.
Tessa Saunders

Angst/Anguish/Anxiety

Angst (also variously translated as anguish, anxiety or dread) is not fear, which
focuses on a particular being. The term is central to the works of Kierkegaard,
Heidegger, Sartre and Camus. For Kierkegaard, angst (sometimes translated as
dread or anxiety) is not an emotion, but a deep-seated strife at the heart of
human being over its existence. The course of history need not have been this
way, and angst is a reaction to the fundamental choices we have to make in the
face of our mortality. In his writings of the 1920s, Heidegger took up Kierkeg-
aard’s term (but often translated as anxiety) to argue that human beings for the
most part ramble on in ‘idle talk’, repeating clichés about everything from the
weather to death to cover over their angst over finitude. Like Kierkegaard,
Heidegger argued that angst was not directed towards fearsome beings or situ-
ations, but instead was ‘nothing other than the pure and simple experience of
being in the sense of being-in-the-world’. In angst, we are struck by a funda-
mental mood of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) that presses home, so to speak,
the fact of our thrownness into the world (you didn’t choose this life) while
bringing to the fore our possibilities to be something other than what we’ve

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made of ourselves. Camus would later link angst to the absurdity of existence,
the mismatch between the cause-and-effect nature around us and our con-
sciousness of the choices before us. For Sartre, angst (translated as anguish) is
the human awareness of not just our inherent freedom, but also our responsi-
bility for our own free choices. Sartre argues that for the most part, we evade
this responsibility, since we are devoted instead to a ‘bad faith’ that denies the
freedom of an engaged existence.
Peter Gratton

Authenticity

The existentialist credo that ‘existence precedes essence’ does not seem to leave
much room for normative claims about what one ought to do. Yet, ‘authenticity’
is an ethical term central to existentialism. Heidegger uses ‘authenticity’ (Eigen-
tlichkeit) to describe when the being that we ourselves are (Dasein) is most its
‘own’ (eigen). But if what is one’s own is precisely one’s possibilities, then how
can one choice be more ‘authentic’ than others? For Heidegger and later exis-
tentialist writers, such as Sartre, authenticity is not acceding to a pregiven iden-
tity (to be authentically ‘urban’ or ‘hipster’ or some other identity), but the
opposite. Heidegger contrasts authenticity to the inauthentic existence of das
Man (the ‘they’), the public persona we take on when immersed in the clichés
of everyday life, when we simply go along with what comes along. Here, Dasein
‘loses itself’, and Sartre termed this loss ‘bad faith’. This state of ‘fallenness and
inauthenticity’ is a stupor that requires, for a Heidegger, the ‘call of conscience’.
Thus, the ethic of authenticity can’t give you a set of norms to follow, since the
point precisely is to act from out of one’s own freedom, not merely to conform
to the crowds around us. Sartre’s account of authenticity, as he argues in Note-
books for an Ethics (1947–1948), is not just about our relation to ourselves, but is
an assumption of our responsibility to affirm the freedom of others through
sustained practical engagements.
Peter Gratton

Bad Faith

Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is a form of existential self-deception theorized by Sartre in

Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre’s analysis of nothingness suggests that the
for-itself’s power of negation can be turned against the in-itself (see Being-in-it-
self/Being-for-itself): reflective consciousness negates the pre-reflective con-
sciousness it takes as its object because it cannot grasp what is pre-reflective
without thematizing it. Thus the self is torn in reflection between being posited as

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a unity and being reflexively grasped as a duality. This instability at the heart of
the self opens up the possibility of a project of self-deception through which the
for-itself attempts to evade anguish. Anguish arises from the awareness of the
nothingness at the heart of the for-itself. The project of bad faith thus involves a
self-interpretation that does not recognize the for-itself for what it is. Either by
singling out one of the two poles of freedom and facticity, or by misunderstand-
ing their nature, the for-itself is viewed in terms of some in-itself being. Sartre
gives a number of examples. Famously, a café waiter who fully identifies with his
facticity views himself as an in-itself waiter. The woman who is ambivalent about
being seduced interprets her body as an in-itself she can freely rise above. Even
sincerity involves an identification with an in-itself, that of the sincere individual.
Although in each case, the for-itself also relates to this in-itself in a way that betrays
its nature as always lying beyond any fixed interpretation of itself, the resulting
interpretative instability hides behind that of all self-reflection. Unlike Heidegger’s
understanding of inauthenticity, this is condemned by Sartre as fundamentally
immoral.
Christian Onof

Barth, Karl

Swiss Reformed theologian, Karl Barth (1886–1968) is widely regarded to have

been the most significant Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. Barth
was an ‘existentialist theologian’ in the minds of his contemporaries because of
his early works, particularly his celebrated second edition of The Epistle to the
Romans (1922) and Christian Dogmatics (1927).
Barth is indebted to Kierkegaard and his concept of the ‘infinite qualitative
difference’ between God and humanity, a relationship that Barth claims ‘is for
me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy’. Following Kierkeg-
aard, Barth bases his theological method upon the understanding that God is
‘Wholly Other’: transcendent to humanity. Religious knowledge is understood
to be totally dependent upon God’s self-revelation, the Word of God, notably in
Jesus Christ. This stood as a strong challenge to the prominent liberal Protes-
tantism of his education, which Barth argues had ceded theological method to
anthropology and religious philosophy, thus losing Christocentric
particularity.
In his later work The Church Dogmatics (4 vols, 1939–1957) Barth begins to
eschew existentialism, declaring that he will now avoid ‘the slightest appear-
ance of giving theology a basis, support, or even a mere justification in the way
of existential philosophy’. However, Barth does not reject existentialism as a
theological dialogue partner. He critically engages both Heidegger and Sartre
on the question of nothingness, but seeks to give the concept a decidedly

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theological significance. Barth’s turn away from existential philosophy

famously led him into conflict with Rudolf Bultmann.
Bret D. Stephenson

Beckett

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Irish writer best known for the incendiary twen-
tieth-century play Waiting for Godot (1948), was most of all interested in
human beings’ apprehension of basic experience under constraint. From
Beckett’s first published story Assumption (1929) to his final play What is the
Word (1989), human existence is exposed in exhaustive detail through every-
day action and thought pushed to staggering extremes. Writing poetry, plays
and prose for 60 years, Beckett’s exhaustive approach to life’s constraints
mirrors the progressively spare nature of his writing, typified by the basic
social hierarchy of the play Catastrophe (1982) and the repetitions of his final
play, What Where (1983). In an interview from 1961, Beckett famously stated:
‘I wouldn’t have had any reason to write . . . novels if I could have expressed
their subject in philosophic terms.’ This is Beckett’s virtue: his texts have a
distilled availability to existential interpretation, different indeed from expos-
itory existential texts. As with philosopher Heidegger’s existential analytic
of everydayness, Beckett’s work mines life at its most primordial. His plays
take place on single sets, often barren rooms, and novels like The Unnamable
are recounted by narrators dying or unsure of ever having existed. As for
Heidegger too, ‘authentic’ being can only be encountered in anticipation of
death, as in the play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Beckett’s profundity is in
approaching the liminal ambiguity of ‘being’ through writing as spare as the
tremulous existences actualized within it.
Corey Wakeling

Being-in-Itself/Being-for-Itself

In his Cartesian Meditations (1931), Husserl distances himself from the Cartesian
view that to exist as a conscious human being is to be a substance. The key dif-
ference between our way of being and that of other things (being-in-itself) is
that we are not in the world in the same way as things are in space. This leads
Heidegger to reinterpret our existence as defined through its being in-a-world,
thereby completely rejecting the Cartesian framework of subjectivity. Sartre
takes this difference as showing that we are not in the world in the spatial mode
of being characterizing things, but in a different mode, the mode of not being

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what one is. This characterizes the spontaneity of consciousness, which is always
beyond any property that could characterize it.
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness thus differentiates between two types of
being that cannot be reduced to the phenomenon we experience: the being of
the object of consciousness, and consciousness itself. Being-in-itself character-
izes entities that are complete in themselves. Being-for-itself is a lack of being
that is intentionally directed towards being-in-itself through negation. It is a
‘hole of being at the heart of Being’. Nothingness separates these two
beings.
This lack of being defines a fundamental project for the for-itself: to tran-
scend itself towards being in-itself. But the goal of this project, which is the
desire to be God, that is, a being-for-itself-in-itself, is an impossibility. Being-
for-itself is authentic when it grasps that the gap to the in-itself is
unbridgeable.
Christian Onof

Being-in-the-World

A key feature of our way of being as humans, according to the tradition of Western
metaphysics, is that we are subjects. This characterizes us as beings who encounter
a world of objects through a cognitive relation. Heidegger challenges both this
notion of subjectivity and the nature of our relation to the world. His complaint
stems from the need to re-examine the central question of Being. To be human is to
be the kind of being for which there is Being, that is, for which things are intelli-
gible. As a result, existence is not to be understood in terms of a subject posited
independently of objects.
Heidegger proposes rather to understand human existence as a way of
being that is defined through its relation to things that are intelligible to it. That
is, it cannot be isolated as subject from this environment: its way of being is
‘being-in-the-world’. The relation to the world that is implied here is not one
of spatial location as for objects, but that of being-in.
Heidegger characterizes this as a relation of concern. That is, the intelligi-
bility of things for me is not that of cognition, but of what is meaningful to my
existence. This meaning is essentially practical and reflects my involvements
with things. The primacy of being-in-the-world implies that we are to under-
stand our existence as a facticity. We are not primarily subjects who happen
to encounter things as objects, but rather primordially find ourselves in a
world.
Christian Onof

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Berdyaev

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) was the best-known of the Russian religious phi-
losophers of the first half of the twentieth century. Although strongly influenced
by German idealism and Jacob Boehme, the distinctive Russian character of his
work was reflected in the influence of Dostoevsky, to whom he devoted an
important book, and in his lifelong preoccupation with the historical destiny of
Russia and ‘the Russian idea’. Berdyaev placed an especially high value on
human freedom (or ‘Spirit’) and the transcendence of personality over biology,
culture, politics and ontology. He also attacked the reification of religious val-
ues in the Church, an attack he saw as prefigured in Dostoevsky’s ‘Legend of the
Grand Inquisitor’. His emphasis on freedom is already marked in his The Mean-
ing of the Creative Act (1908), where he proposes a high view of human creativity
as reflecting the image of the creator God. Although he had suffered internal
exile under Tsarist rule and was sympathetic to some of the social aims of the
Revolution, he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922. He finally settled in
Paris, where he forged close friendships with thinkers such as Jacques Maritain
and edited the journal Put’ (The Way), one of the most influential organs for
philosophical reflection among Russian émigrés. In this period his thought
became more markedly dualistic as he saw totalitarian systems tightening their
grip on European life, a dualism reflected in such book titles as Slavery and Free-
dom and The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar.
George Pattison

Binswanger

Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966). See the chapter ‘Existentialism, Psychoanaly-

sis and Psychotherapy’.

Body

Existential approaches to the body are attuned to the fact that we live as bodily
beings. Rather than account for the human body in purely objective terms,
existential and phenomenological accounts of the body acknowledge its lived
dimension. The German term Lieb (living body/organism) is distinguished
from Körper (physical body/matter) to underscore this point. It is said that
medical and scientific orientations do not take sufficient account of this fact,
which concerns the difference between one’s own experience of illness and its
objective existence ‘for others’ (Sartre). The lived body is not always thought
positively, however. De Beauvoir feels that feminine corporeality played an

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ambivalent role, and suggests that it hinders the transcendence that inheres
less problematically in masculine forms of agency.
The body plays a consistently pivotal role in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy,
which focuses on matters of perception and movement. For him, it is through
our bodies that we are open and available to the world. Posture, for example, is
conceived as a permeable orientation towards the world and others rather than
some static physical fact. Although Merleau-Ponty’s later work suggests a com-
plex relation between human sentience and the perceived world, beyond any
simple subject–object distinction, the body still features as key to human
experience.
There is another strand of corporeal thinking which resists the phenomeno-
logical ‘lived body’. Rather than smoothly integrate the body with subjectivity,
Nietzsche affirmed the potential of the body to exceed the perspective of con-
scious agency. Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski developed Nietzsche’s
suggestion, inaugurating a French reading of the body’s singular potential in
the mid-twentieth century that was more or less contemporaneous with Mer-
leau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy of the body.
Philipa Rothfield

Boredom

Boredom became a noticeable feature of modern cultural attitudes in the later

eighteenth century. In the Romantic period the beginnings of a cult of boredom
are witnessed by, for example, Byron’s Don Juan and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
By 1843, Kierkegaard is able to write of it as a characteristic feature of aesthetic
nihilism. Written under the guise of one of his aesthetic pseudonyms, Kierkeg-
aard’s essay ‘The Rotation Method’ (in Either/Or) offers a mini-history of the
world as a history of boredom. The topic had already been addressed in phi-
losophy by Schopenhauer, who depicted human life as oscillating between the
pain of unfulfilled desire and the boredom consequent on its fulfilment. Only
those with higher intellectual endowments were able to escape this vicious
circle.
Kierkegaard, however, sees boredom not as inevitable but as a result of adopt-
ing a particular view of life. Like other mental states, boredom belongs within the
domain of freedom and responsibility. The negative effects of boredom and its
association with crime were explored extensively by Dostoevsky in characters
such as Svidrigailov (Crime and Punishment) and Stavrogin (Demons), while Baude-
laire gave paradigmatic expression to the ennui of modern urban existence. In
What is Metaphysics? and The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics Heidegger portrayed
deep boredom as leading to a loss of the sense of Being that could provoke the
individual into a heightened reflection on the question of the meaning of Being as

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such. Postwar, boredom was frequently seen as an aspect of modern disenchant-

ment, as in Alberto Moravia’s novel Boredom.
George Pattison

Boss

Medard Boss (1903–1990). See ‘Existentialism, Psychoanalysis and

Psychotherapy’.

Buber

Born in Vienna but having spent most of his life in Germany and then Israel,
Martin Buber (1878–1965) is most well known for his ‘dialogic philosophy’,
which was influenced by Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Simmel and Dilthey.
Dialogic philosophy argues that it is the task of each person to fully actualize his
or her uniqueness by developing a unified personality. This process occurs
through the dual acts of distancing and relating in encounters with others. In
Buber’s ‘ontology of the between’ each partner in a relation exists as a polarity
of that relation, so that the relation or the ‘between’ is what is ‘real’. Although
often labelled an existentialist, Buber rejected the label, arguing that existential-
ism does not fully acknowledge otherness. His placement of meetings with oth-
ers at the centre of human reality was a major influence on Emmanuel Levinas.
Buber’s most widely read book is the 1923 I and Thou (Ich und Du), which
distinguished between ‘I–Thou’ and ‘I–It’ modes of existence. In an ‘I–It’ relation
the other is a static object that is classified under universal categories, experi-
enced and used. In an ‘I–Thou’ relation each participates in the dynamic process
of the other, who is encountered as a unique subject. ‘I–It’, or ‘monologic’, rela-
tions are necessary for scientific and practical activity, but the development of
the person occurs through ‘I–Thou’, or ‘dialogic’, relations. ‘I–Thou’ relations
can occur with nature, between people, and with spirit, or the ‘eternal Thou’.
Buber was especially interested in pedagogic and therapeutic ‘I–Thou’ rela-
tions, in which one partner helps the other to actualize their self, and he devel-
oped a philosophy of education based on education of character. His dialogic
philosophy also fits into a larger program of cultural criticism. He was a cul-
tural Zionist who advocated a binational Israeli–Palestinian state and the
renewal of society through decentralized, communitarian socialism. He rejected
material determinism and believed social change occurs from the ground up as
interpersonal relations are altered.
In his studies of the relation between religion and philosophy, Buber criti-
cized philosophy for assuming that the mind experiences a detached world

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and locating truth in universals. He criticized the isolation and instrumentality

of self-consciousness in phenomenology, the suspension of the ethical in
Kierkegaard, and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud for treating the other’s truth as
mere ideology. Buber preferred religion, which locates truth in subjective expe-
rience and has an exemplary encounter with otherness in the relation with
God. However, he was critical of both the legal aspect – which rejects the par-
ticularities of each situation – and the mystical aspect of religion. He showed
that mysticism follows the same dynamic as collectivism. In both, absorption
of the self in the all turns into an individualistic lack of engagement with oth-
ers. Buber’s rejection of religious law and mysticism was controversial in reli-
gious circles, while his disdain for systemization made him an outsider in
philosophy.
Sarah Scott

Bultmann

German theologian and New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976)

is among the foremost of the existentialist theologians and best remembered
for his projects of ‘demythologizing’ and the existentialist interpretation of
scripture. In the 1920s Bultmann came under the influence of his Marburg col-
league Heidegger, and after reading Being and Time, he sought to apply Heide-
gger’s existentialist notion of human being as ‘being-in-the-world’ to the task
of biblical interpretation. For Bultmann, existential analysis provides the theo-
logian with the conceptual categories necessary for understanding the human
condition of the believer as addressed in the kerygma, or proclamation of the
gospel, not only in the mythologized past of scripture, but also in the present
age. As outlined in his essay ‘New Testament and Mythology’ (1941), Bult-
mann’s project of demythologizing did not advocate the excision of mythical
elements from Christian texts, but instead called for their careful reinterpreta-
tion ‘in terms of their understanding of existence’. For example, faith in Jesus
Christ is, for Bultmann, based not in a series of judgements concerning the
historical veracity of scripture, but rather, in the existential orientation of the
believer who is personally confronted by the gospel message in the present
day. The twin projects of demythologizing and the existential interpretation of
scripture is, for Bultmann, a necessary means for making the message of the
New Testament intelligible to a scientific age that is unable to penetrate the
mythological language of the gospel writers. Bultmann was, however, fre-
quently criticized by Barth and others for having ceded theological autonomy
to existential philosophy.
Bret D. Stephenson

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Camus

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was an author, thinker, essayist, dramatist, political

journalist and Nobel Prize Winner. Camus was born and raised in French-occu-
pied Algeria, ‘poor but happy’, as he would later describe it. Camus’s work is
structured in three phases, in each of which Camus wrote a framing play, a novel
and an extended philosophical essay. Camus’s name will forever be popularly
associated with the short novel, The Outsider (1942). The novel is a dispassionate
description of a man, Meursault, whose only defence for shooting an Arab is ‘the
sun’ and ‘the sea’. It is aligned with the play Caligula (1944) and philosophical
essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which examined the famous idea of absurdity.
From 1943, Camus became associated with the newspaper Combat, which was
involved with the French resistance to the Nazi occupiers. The experience had a
decisive effect, which can be tracked in a series of lyrical essays such as ‘The
Almond Trees’, ‘Prometheus in the Underworld’ and ‘Letters to a German Friend’.
Camus’s thinking passed from a broadly ethical focus on individual experiences
and attitudes to a political philosophy of solidarity. Camus claims in 1942 that an
authentic response to the absurd involves a rebellion against the impulse to ‘leap’
to metaphysical conclusions. Following 1943, Camus begins to argue that ‘I rebel,
therefore we are’. According to the later Camus, the inalienable individual demand
for a unifying meaning to life examined in his first work embodies and points
towards a community (the ‘we are’) with our contemporaries that does not rest on
any, unavailable, metaphysical teachings. Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague drama-
tizes this position in a plague-stricken, quarantined city, and it is developed philo-
sophically at length in The Rebel (1950), a sustained critique of fascism and Stalinism.
Camus’s criticism in The Rebel of the Marxist heritage, and advocacy of a broadly
social–democratic politics, put him at odds with his contemporaries Sartre, Mer-
leau-Ponty and de Beauvoir. The 1950s were indeed a difficult period for Camus,
as his second marriage collapsed, his hopes for France’s reform from the immedi-
ate post-resistance period were quashed, and his attempts to mediate in the
French–Algerian conflict met hostility from both sides. Camus’s disillusionment
at this time is reflected in the dark fictional monologue The Fall (1956), and the
captivating pieces in Exile and the Kingdom (1957), which immediately preceded his
award of the Nobel Prize for literature. At the time of his untimely death by car
accident in 1960, Camus had begun work on a third phase of writings, including
the posthumously published draft of the novel The First Man.
Mathew Sharpe

Cioran

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) was a Romanian born essayist and aphorist, who
lived and wrote for the most part in Paris, where he lived from 1937 until his

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death. His early years involved a frequently remarked commitment to right-

wing political views, and during this time he penned pieces in favour of Hitler
and Franco. After moving to Paris in 1937, this orientation in his work declined
before being criticized by Cioran himself. Cioran’s writings, which tend towards
the short form, deal with many of the great concerns of existentialism (suffer-
ing, death and despair, alienation and the lack of a given meaning in life), while
also dwelling on topics of a more pronounced phenomenological nature, like
insomnia, solitude and the experience and nature of music.
Cioran is often compared to Nietzsche, with whom he shares not only the
same genres of writing, and many of his most well-known themes, but also his
mercilessly critical gaze. Nonetheless, the tone of Cioran’s work is darker, and
he criticizes Nietzsche for his optimism, his naïvety and frivolity especially
with respect to metaphysical themes, and the breathlessness of his later prose.
Cioran is the more measured of the two, but also the more fatalistic. There is
nonetheless a strain of refined, minimal humanism in Cioran’s writings, which
sees the incurably pointless, comical and horrifying strivings of human beings,
alone and collectively, through the eyes of a certain pity and occasional muted
amazement. Underlying this humanism is a modern form of Stoic ethics: a
methodical and rigorous expulsion of metaphysical investment and naïve hope
engendering a noble form of human existence.
Jon Roffe

Dasein

The term Dasein arises in response to Heidegger’s question: ‘what is the being that
will give access to the question of the meaning of Being?’ The answer is the being
for whom Being matters; human existence, or more literally, the being defined by
its ‘being-there’. Dasein is, therefore, nothing other than ‘Man’, inasmuch as being-
there describes the state of human existence in terms of its being-in-the-world.
The method pursued in Being and Time may be said to consist in the attempt to
elucidate the character of Dasein, through understanding Dasein within the bounds
of temporality. An interpretation of its temporality would allow us in turn to
approach the meaning of Being itself. Heidegger holds that this must lead us to
confront the existential matters of mortality, and thus by extension, angst. This raises
the problem of authenticity – the possibility for Dasein to exist in its fullness such
that it might comprehend Being. In turn, Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity
as contextualized by its historical quality means that Dasein’s being finds its expres-
sion both in, and as time. This mutuality between Dasein and temporality was only
intended as but one aspect of a broader, never-completed project of Heidegger’s: to
deconstruct the history of philosophy itself in relation to temporality.
Steven Churchill

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Das Man

Das Man is the German, third-person singular meaning ‘they’ or ‘one’, as in ‘one
just doesn’t dress that way’. Das Man plays an important role in Martin Heide-
gger’s Being and Time (1927). Das Man, the ‘they’, is the public persona we tend
to take on when following the masses, and is thus opposed to the authentic
recognition of our ownmost possibilities beyond what ‘they say’ one should be.
Heidegger’s analysis is influenced by the work of Kierkegaard, who argued
that singular individ uals lose themselves in the ‘crowd’, and Nietzsche,
who excoriated ‘herd moralities’ always out to destroy the freest spirits
among us. For Heidegger, Dasein, the being that we ourselves are, dwells con-
stantly in the ‘they’. We chit-chat about the weather or lose ourselves in vain
discussions about sports, all because that’s what ‘people do’. We do this even as
we conform to the paradoxical dictum that we shouldn’t conform. For Heide-
gger, though, das Man is not new to modern mass man, but derives from our
being-in-the-world as mortal beings. In the face of angst over our ownmost
possibilities, including our being-towards-death, das Man ‘tranquilizes’ us with
regard to ‘all possibilities of Being’. Despite these negative portrayals of das
Man, the lesson is not that we can escape to some ideal place where such a pub-
lic persona is not created and maintained. Rather, our existence is marked by a
struggle to rise out of the crowd, to orient our ownmost possibilities in ways not
directed by the whims of what ‘one says’.
Peter Gratton

Death

For existentialist thinkers, the theme of death is central in the context of mean-
ing, authenticity and freedom: that is, the inevitability of death rebounds on
the understanding of what it means to live, and how one can best live. Contem-
plation of death points to the deep paradox of human existence: that we are
both contingent and transcendent; that we are finite creatures with a taste for
and anticipation of the infinite. Death is, as Jaspers put it, the archetypal ‘limit
situation’ that we are powerless to comprehend or change. However, there are
radical differences among existentialist thinkers about the interpretation of
death, and these are largely traceable to the decisive differences between athe-
istic and theistic branches of the movement.
According to Heidegger, who is arguably neutral on the question of God,
death is the unsurpassable possibility that is the ultimate context for all other pos-
sibilities: that is, Dasein exists as ‘being-towards-death’. Far from being an ‘exter-
nal’ threat, death is the intrinsic and constantly present potentiality that lies at the
heart of the structure of Dasein’s existence. Consequently, facing up to the

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existential meaning of death – a recognition that involves anxiety – is the defini-

tive mark of authentic being, for it has a uniquely individualizing effect on Dasein;
one’s death is uniquely one’s own. Of course, in our immersion in ‘the they’ (das
Man) we commonly trivialize death, seeking comfort in practices and assump-
tions that impersonalize and sanitize death, making it inconspicuous and irrele-
vant to the task of living. Such practices have the result of cutting us off from the
very horizon within which authenticity is possible.
The strident atheism of Sartre and Camus strongly challenge Heidegger’s
approach to death. For Sartre, there is nothing distinctly ‘mine’ about my death,
as if ‘my death’ were some kind of unique and personally forged creation. To the
contrary, meaning is a function of the temporal structure of human freedom that
is terminated or truncated by death. The meaninglessness of death is further
underlined by the arbitrariness and abruptness of its arrival, breaking in on the
process of free unfolding. Far from being the principal possibility within the life
of an individual, death is entirely ‘other’ to the possibility-driven ontological
structure of human beings as free agents. Given all this, death is literally an
absurdity. Indeed, it ultimately reduces life itself to an absurdity: ‘It is absurd
that we are born, and it is absurd that we die.’ A similar approach led Camus to
claim that suicide is the only serious philosophical question, although he argued
against it as an option. For him, suicide is a defeatist act; instead he urges us to
rise – Sisyphus like – in scorn and revolt against the cruelty of death by defiantly
embracing life even in the midst of its absurdity.
Among the theistic existentialists, Marcel and Unamuno drew a clear trajec-
tory between the contemplation of death and belief in God. According to Mar-
cel, far from being absurd, death underlines the transcendent and immortal
essence of human being. On the one hand, human transcendence emerges most
strongly in the experience of faithful love which is itself made possible by the
primal human urge for communion with God. But on the other hand, it is in the
death of a loved one that the transcendent nature of human being is most
acutely revealed, for intimate love itself affirms the immortality of the beloved.
Unamuno comes to a similar conclusion on the basis of a consideration of the
creature’s stubborn will to persist in being (Spinoza’s conatus essendi), which he
reads as an insatiable appetite for immortality and an implicit affirmation of
belief in God as the source of all life.
Richard Colledge

De Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was born in Paris and studied philosophy at the
Sorbonne. For several years, de Beauvoir taught philosophy at high schools in the
country and in Paris, but she soon focused on literary and philosophical writing.

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She published her first novel She Came to Stay in 1943. This was followed by sev-
eral essays developing existentialism, and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). In The
Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir emphasizes the ambiguity of human life: ‘to say
that [existence] is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it
must be constantly won’. On her account, this ambiguity implies that we have to
create our own values and projects. She links the idea of a basic ontological free-
dom with an ethics that acknowledges and values that freedom, and examines
ethical attitudes and antinomies of action.
Her most famous work of philosophy is The Second Sex (1949), which devel-
ops an existential–phenomenological account of the oppression of women.
Existentialism is the view that there is no predetermined human nature, that we
are all absolutely free to determine how we shall live, and must, therefore, be
held responsible for all our actions. De Beauvoir made fundamental alterations
to the theory as initially expounded by Sartre, outlining a theory of oppression,
a notable lack in Sartre’s formulation of existentialism. De Beauvoir’s view is
that women are materially oppressed in lacking the concrete means to form a
group and be free, and psychologically oppressed in having internalized a sense
of self as the Other – that is, as strange and inferior. One of her most controver-
sial claims is that women are sometimes in bad faith, or willingly pursue their
own lack of freedom, something she considers a moral fault. Her view is that
‘every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a
degradation of existence into the “in-itself” – the brutish life of subjection to
given conditions – and of liberty into constraint or contingence. This downfall
represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it
spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil.’
The second volume of The Second Sex provides a detailed phenomenological
description supporting her contention that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes,
a woman’. De Beauvoir’s recommendations for change are multiple: economic
independence for women, a refusal to accept the limited roles for women
endorsed by society, and an alteration in the myths and stories about women. De
Beauvoir’s ideas have had an enormous influence on women’s liberation move-
ments as well as inspiring a vast and growing body of scholarship. Her later
work, Old Age (1970), uses her central conception of the Other to interrogate the
experience of aging and death.
De Beauvoir’s novels include All Men are Mortal (1946), The Mandarins (1954)
and The Woman Destroyed (1967). She was editor of and writer for the journal Les
Temps Modernes with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty for many years, and wrote four
volumes of memoirs. In 2004 de Beauvoir’s early philosophical essays were
published for the first time in English in the collection Philosophical Writings. In
2009 the first complete translation of The Second Sex was published, an event
likely to further enhance philosophical understanding of her thought.
Marguerite La Caze

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Dostoevsky

In the novels Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons
and The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) created a range of
characters, scenarios and questions that anticipated many of the themes of
twentieth-century existentialism. Shortly after his first novel appeared, he was
arrested for involvement in a radical discussion group. Following many months
of solitary confinement, culminating in a mock execution, he spent four years in
a prison camp, followed by five years compulsory military service. These expe-
riences provided rich material for novels that explored the extremes of human
emotion, and Dostoevsky was from early on familiar with the criminality and
nihilism of many of his characters. The irrationalism of the Underground Man
and the atheism of Ivan Karamazov were seen as expressing the author’s own
views, although it is clear that Dostoevsky was concerned to expose modern
nihilism as a form of human self-deification and, as such, rebellion against God.
This is particularly clear in his depiction of such characters as Raskolnikov
(Crime and Punishment), Kirillov (Demons) and Ivan Karamazov himself, whose
atheism was summed up in the statement that ‘If God does not exist, everything
is permitted.’ Although his ‘legend’ of an encounter between Christ and the
Grand Inquisitor can be seen as an attack on ecclesiastical Christianity and
although he confessed to never definitively escaping the crucible of doubt in
which his faith was formed, Dostoevsky extolled a form of Christian life marked
by love of Christ, universal compassion and absolute humility.
George Pattison

Dread (see Angst/Anguish/Anxiety)

Ecstases

Rooted in the Greek ekstasis, meaning ‘to stand outside’, the ecstases are the focal
point of Heidegger’s investigations into the being of time. We generally think
of time in terms of the stable ticking of the clock from past to present to future,
with each of our experiences anchored in some present ‘now’. Heidegger argues,
however, that this is an ‘inauthentic’ conception of time and that temporality is
the ‘ekstatikon pure and simple’, a ‘primordial “outside-of-itself” in and for
itself’. As ‘possibility’, Dasein, the being that we ourselves are, is never in time
standing at some now-point. Rather, Dasein is always out-ahead-of-itself in its
future, which Heidegger considered the primary ecstasis. But this projection
carries along our historicity and the meaning that the past has made possible.
Thus, the second ‘ecstasis’ is ‘having been’, with the third being the present,
which for Heidegger is not the ‘now-point’ of clock-time, but instead marks our

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being-alongside other beings, including other Daseins. But although we can

separate these ecstases through reflection, they form a ‘unity’, an unstable tim-
ing or rhythm of existence that provides for our openness towards a future not
wholly written from the past or present. This Heideggerian discussion becomes
important later to Sartre in Being and Nothingness, where he argues that each
ecstasis is united with the others, such that the past is always a ‘past-future’, the
future is a ‘future-past’, and the present is not a ‘now’, but the attentiveness of
the self to its existence.
Peter Gratton

Facticity

In twentieth-century existentialism, ‘facticity’ (Faktizität – a term coined by

Fichte and the neo-Kantians) came to stand for concrete, situated, ‘given’ sub-
jectivity. In Heidegger’s early Marburg writings, facticity simply designates the
character of the Being of Dasein in its temporal particularity. In Being and Time,
however, it is used in a more specific sense as one of the three dimensions of
care (Sorge) along with understanding or projection (or sometimes ‘existential-
ity’) and falling. As such, it is often used in ways that are largely synonymous
with thrownness (Geworfenheit). Heidegger unpacks the meaning of facticity
largely via his analysis of ‘states-of-mind’ (Befindlichkeit). His contention here
is that Dasein always and already has its way of being-in-the-world according
to a mood ‘into which it has been delivered over’.
For Sartre, facticity comes to mean ‘determinedness’ in the sense of the
‘weight’ of the past and the demands of the present that stand opposed to the
realization of the individual’s freedom. In this context, facticity means some-
thing quite close to what Kierkegaard referred to as ‘necessity’ (Nødvendighed).
Here, where the term is open to more ‘ontic’ elaboration than in Heideggerian
thought, one may speak of facticity as relating to a sense of the ‘givenness’ of
life through which horizons are narrowed and one performs one’s ‘received’
roles and functions, rather than exercising one’s freedom in its dizzying
absoluteness.
Richard Colledge

Faith

It is generally acknowledged that arguments for religious beliefs such as the

existence of God, an afterlife, and so on, are not compelling. Many people with
religious beliefs, however, continue to hold their beliefs claiming simply to have
faith. In the existential tradition Kierkegaard is the philosopher who has dealt

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most with giving an account of faith. For Kierkegaard, faith has little to do with
believing in something because there is good evidence. It is rather an unwaver-
ing determination to believe passionately in something despite, or even because
of, its absurdity. This approach has the result that the objective truth of one’s
beliefs becomes irrelevant. Faith is solely a way of believing something or a way
of existing. It is this aspect of faith – focusing on the individual’s existence
rather than the object of belief – that ties it to existentialism.
The problem is that here the distinction between a reasonable faith and an
unreasonable or blind faith is lost. Consequently, a person with such faith has
no rational arguments for his or her faith. This means that there are no rational
grounds for choosing one faith over another. Thus, the faith that God became a
man is on par with the faith that Zeus became a swan. For many people such a
view of faith is unacceptable. However, to go the other way and hold that faith
should be based on good evidence is to make faith into the conclusion of an
argument. And, as mentioned, arguments for religious beliefs are not rationally
compelling.
James Giles

Frankl

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997). See the chapter ‘Existentialism, Psychoanalysis and

Psychotherapy’.

Freedom

Freedom is the quintessential existentialist value. It lies at the heart of most

existential philosophies. For example, for Sartre in Being and Nothingness the
human being is a free upsurge of consciousness thanks to which there is a
world. Most existentialists, except notably Nietzsche, insist that the human
being is free. The freedom of human intentional consciousness allows for the
world to be born and for values to be erected. Ontological freedom allows the
creation of the world through the conscious being’s perception of objects. By the
same token, it is a moral freedom since it allows the free valuing of things in the
created world. It is also, for most existentialists, a freedom from the illusions of
an afterlife and an otherworldly realm. For theistic existentialists, freedom
means insisting that the relation to God and the values He posits is one that is
freely chosen by the individual. For atheistic existentialism, the human being is
understood as entirely responsible for his or her own fate, choices and values.
In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dostoevsky suggested: ‘If God does not exist,
everything is permitted.’ However, the freedom gained from the absence of

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God is not to be equated with moral licence. If existentialists posit the human
being as free, they also insist that the human is, therefore, responsible for him-
self, his actions and the world he creates through action, a world with or with-
out God. For existentialists like de Beauvoir and Sartre, the philosophy of
freedom entails a social and political stance that requires the commitment of
individuals to make the world one in which freedom may flourish. And, there-
fore, individuals ought to work towards liberation.
Christine Daigle

God

God is a problematic figure for existentialism, theistic or atheistic. Kierkeg-

aard, a theist existentialist, speaks of God as an unknown that stands beyond
the reach of our reason. It is through introspection that the subject will dis-
cover this unknown, a ‘something’ of which we may say nothing. A similar
problem arises for Marcel, who locates the relation of the individual with God
at the pre-reflective level of consciousness (which supports the reflective, that
is, rational, consciousness). God is the bearer of existence and gives meaning
to the world and the existents living therein. But the relation with God, or
God himself, may never be reflectively illuminated. The relation is what sus-
tains intersubjectivity and the relation between consciousnesses and objects
in the world, but is one that will escape our reflective inquiries. Atheistic exis-
tentialism’s problem with God is very different. According to the atheist exis-
tentialist, the problem with believing that God exists is that the individual
will relinquish his responsibility to Him. This is unacceptable for existential-
ists who want the human being to be responsible for his own choices and
actions. Some suggest that God has been invented by human beings so they
can escape moral responsibility. Others, in the same vein as Aristotle, will
rather claim that it does not matter whether God exists or not since the indi-
vidual has to decide whether this God has any value for him. Most, however,
will prefer to echo Nietzsche and declare the death of God and of all accom-
panying transcendent values to focus on the human being and his world.
Christine Daigle

Guilt

The category of guilt is of great importance for existentialist thought, in which

the everyday notion of responsibility for one’s actions is often transformed such
that the individual is understood to be in some sense irredeemably or constitu-
tionally guilty.

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Kierkegaard sets his reflections on guilt in the context of the Christian doc-
trine of original sin, which is for him part of the structure of human being. In the
process, he sets the notion of guilt in dialectical relation not with innocence but
with anxiety. In contrast, Nietzsche offers a genealogy of guilt in which he sug-
gests that the moral notion had its origins in reprisal against loan defaulters
(Schuld carrying connotations of guilt and/or debt). A ‘bad conscience’, then, is
essentially a turning inward of the same logic of reprisal.
Heidegger’s analysis of guilt takes the concept in a radically new direction,
arguing that guilt is not the product of either sinfulness or indebtedness; rather
all such notions are themselves only possible on the basis of a prior primordial
Being-guilty. Heidegger links this ontological sense of guilt to Dasein’s thrown-
ness: that is, its not being its own basis or ground. Dasein is guilty (or in debt)
insofar as it either resides in a ground not of its own making, or resolutely ‘takes
it over’ as its own. But in either case, Dasein never has power ‘over [its] own-
most Being from the ground up’.
Later existentialist thinkers developed the notion in related diverse ways.
For Marcel, for example, an intrinsic guilt resides in the impossibility of mutu-
ally upholding faithfulness to oneself and to others, including the Divine other.
Richard Colledge

Hegel

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) is the most influential of the post-Kantian philoso-

phers, having integrated elements from the idealist philosophies of both Fichte
and Schelling. Hegel’s system included a phenomenology that reconstructed the
cognitive experiences of consciousness in its historical journey towards self-
consciousness; a ‘logic’ of the basic categories of thought about reality; a philoso-
phy of history that conceptualized the events of world history as stages in the
realization of freedom; and a political philosophy that outlined the development
of free modern subjects as depending upon the spheres of family, civil society
(economy) and the political state. An essential reference point for Karl Marx,
Hegel was also significant for Kierkegaard, who pitted the singular existence of
the authentic individual against Hegel’s abstract system of reason.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is best known for its account of the
‘master/slave’ dialectic. Self-consciousness is presented as commencing with a
life-and-death struggle between protagonists who each seek recognition of their
own independence. The protagonist who risks his life for freedom becomes
‘master’, while the one who experiences the ‘fear of death’ becomes a ‘slave’.
The master, however, does not enjoy genuine recognition from an equal,
whereas the slave develops his capacities through work and comes to recognize
himself via the fruits of his labours. This unequal recognition is eventually

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superseded by mutual recognition within modern social and cultural

institutions.
Hegel’s ‘master/slave’ dialectic was taken up by French Hegelians (Alexan-
dre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite) and significantly influenced French existential-
ism, for example in Sartre’s accounts of the self-divided subject and of relations
with others, and de Beauvoir’s analysis of gender relations.
Robert Sinnerbrink

Heidegger

The influence of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) on existentialism cannot be

overstated. In his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger sought to
return philosophy to the meaning of the Being of beings. But the route that he
took, by first explicating the meaning of the being that we ourselves are, for
which he used the German term Dasein, provided the very path that later exis-
tentialists, including Sartre, would tread in plumbing the depths of human sub-
jectivity. The irony, given his renown as an existentialist, is that Heidegger later
published his ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ (1947) as a direct counter to existentialist
appropriations that he deemed too focused on subjective experience. This read-
ing of Heidegger arose because Being and Time did not make the full turn to the
question of the meaning of Being, ending instead with a conception of the tem-
porality of Dasein, not of Being as such. Nevertheless, his arguments in that
work were crucial for all later existentialist thinkers.
Philosophy, Heidegger argued, should not be about what we can know, but
about our practical engagements with the world around us, that is, ‘how’ we
exist prior to any conscious reflection. Fundamentally, Heidegger argued that
we are future-oriented beings who have a certain ‘care’ for the world. By this
Heidegger does not mean an emotional response to existence, but rather that the
world is always already imbued with meaning for us. This ‘care’ is always struc-
tured towards the future and the possibilities of each Dasein. To use a Sartrean
term, we each have a set of ‘projects’, and thus we are not defined by our past or
some human essence, but instead by the possibilities that leave each existence
open. According to Heidegger, this openness to the future is finite, however, and
each Dasein is ‘thrown’ into existence having ‘being-towards-death’ as part of
the structure of its being. Hence, whether we wish to evade our mortality or not,
death is an ever-present possibility, not a theoretical or abstract point.
After the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger’s task was to further his
‘deconstruction’ (Destruktion or Abbau) of previous ways of thinking Being as
one stable entity among others, which he argued was also a linguistic task. He
thus championed poets such as Rilke and Goethe as taking up the charge of
thinking in an age when technological efficiency was stifling what was left of all

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creativity. The fundamental claim of Heidegger, from his earliest writings to his
last, is that Being, and hence beings, does not have a stable essence, but is a
‘how’, a ‘manner’ or a ‘way’. Our existence is not reducible to biological accounts
of our bodily matter, just as our being-towards-death has a meaning beyond
evolutionary accounts of the survival instinct. In this way, our existence always
precedes any supposed essence of the human being, and indeed to exist means
to be open to a future not yet written by the techno-scientific accounts of the
present age.
Peter Gratton

Husserl

The influence of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) upon

philosophers who have been characterized as existentialist, including Heide-
gger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, is uncontroversial; the more difficult question
is whether such influence is best understood in terms of the development of
ideas in Husserl’s thought or as formed predominately in opposition to his
thought.
An instructive programmatic statement of Husserl’s philosophical project is
found in the 1910 essay ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’. Here Husserl explains
his project as aiming to provide the conceptual underpinnings of a ‘science of
science’, an aspiration which has echoes of the Aristotelian notion of a ‘first
philosophy’. Husserl’s concern with the origins and meaning of formal sciences
such as arithmetic and logic is, from the outset, motivated by an awareness of
the generality and universality of these disciplines in the sense that they form
the inferential and conceptual framework for all other branches of knowledge.
Husserl’s ‘transcendental turn’ at the time of the Ideas 1 (1913) represents less a
departure from his earlier investigations than a new-found conviction that it is
through a transcendental phenomenology, concerned with questions of essence,
that the origin and meaning of the sciences can best be understood. This direc-
tion of thought appears to subordinate problems of ‘human existence’ to the
project of articulating the essential structures of pure consciousness and the role
such structures play in the development of the sciences.
How does such a project, then, relate to existentialism? Consideration of
Heidegger’s attempt to recapture the ‘true’ meaning of phenomenology in Being
and Time (1927) can help point in the direction of a more nuanced understand-
ing of Husserl’s relation to existential philosophy. Heidegger’s claim in Being
and Time is that phenomenology is best conceived as an attempt to disclose the
things themselves as they show themselves in our concerned dealings with
them. This suggests an analysis which sets out from our experience of the world
as it discloses itself in practical interactions made possible by our ‘situatedness’

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and the structure of phenomenological time-consciousness. The key insight

here, from the perspective of understanding Husserl’s complex relation to exis-
tentialism, is that an adequate understanding of the origin and meaning of the
sciences depends upon an account of our concrete situation as practically ori-
ented and embodied, or, to adopt Heidegger’s own terminology, on the status
of scientific ‘assertion’ (Aussage) as derivative of the more originary modes of
discourse found in understanding (Verstehen) and interpretation (Auslegung).
George Duke

Intentionality

Intentionality is a characteristic of consciousness. To be conscious is always to

be conscious of something: to ‘intend’ (or refer to, or be directed towards) a
particular object. As such, consciousness is not itself a ‘thing’, but is rather the
directedness towards things. This theme was revived (in a refined form) in the
1870s by Franz Brentano from medieval Scholasticism, and it subsequently
became a central axiom of Husserl’s phenomenological method, and thereafter
existentialist thought.
For Husserl, intended ‘objects’ are discrete meanings or awarenesses imma-
nent to consciousness, including awareness of material objects, illusions, ideas,
inner emotional responses, and so on. Phenomenology, unlike the natural sci-
ences, ‘brackets out’ the vexed question of whether and how objects exist inde-
pendently of the contents of consciousness. Heidegger developed Husserl’s
doctrine of intentionality in ways that moved still further away from the resi-
due of Cartesian metaphysics. He vastly broadened the scope of Husserl’s
subject–object intentional structure to encompass the complex multilayered
whole of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. In this way, the focus shifted from an
emphasis on the privileged vantage point of Husserl’s isolated ego that ‘con-
stitutes’ the world and its meaning to a view in which Dasein is always already
in a meaning-saturated world, in which Dasein and world interpenetrate each
other.
Sartre continued the decentring of the subject in its world-constituting role
by arguing that far from the ego being the source of consciousness (with some
kind of sovereign oversight of the process), it is rather itself constituted by con-
sciousness. Merleau-Ponty took this tradition of thought in a strongly ‘bodily’
direction by charting the psychophysical dimensions and expressions of inten-
tionality through such diverse phenomena as the sense of the body in space,
our reaching for and contacting worldly objects, the various modes of intersub-
jectivity, bodily gesture, and so on.
Richard Colledge

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 A–Z Glossary

Jaspers

The philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), along with that of Heidegger, gave
rise to the German existentialist movement in the early part of the twentieth cen-
tury. Jaspers, who now stands in the shadow of Heidegger’s philosophical stature,
was first trained as a psychologist prior to transitioning to philosophy. As a psy-
chologist he adopted Husserl’s phenomenological method and produced one
major work called General Psychopathology (1913), which is still in print. Jaspers’s
foray into existentialism is marked by his juxtaposition of Kierkegaard and Nietz-
sche, which first appeared in his early work Psychology of World Views (1919). This
comparison resulted in the development of his ‘philosophy of existence’ (Existenz-
Philosophy), which is predicated on an always unfinished goading of human
inquiry beyond the limits of cognition towards Being-itself. This fundamental
concept was reworked and eventually appeared in what is commonly considered
the major work of his later period, Of Truth (1947), which remains untranslated in
its entirety. While the influences of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche reappear through-
out Jaspers’s oeuvre, his major philosophical underpinnings are inextricably tied
to Kant’s theory of Ideas and his transcendental deduction.
Jaspers claims his philosophical and existential identity through his anti-sys-
tematic approach to the pervasive ontological question: What is Being? His
response to the question of Being is grounded in a rich architectonic structure he
calls ‘the Encompassing’. Following Kant, Jaspers rejects the possibility of a for-
mal ontology and works to identify various realms of being through the con-
struct of the Encompassing, which manifests itself in immanent and transcendent,
as well as subjective and objective, modes. Jaspers argues that the Encompass-
ing is not itself the horizon of our knowledge, nor is it something we actually
encounter qua object. Rather, the Encompassing can be understood as the
ground of Being from which new horizons emerge. In Jaspers’s own words, ‘the
Modes of the Encompassing illuminate a basic feature of man’s possibility’.
In addition to Jaspers’s primary work as an existentialist, he made signifi-
cant contributions to the fields of political philosophy and the philosophy of
religion. In particular, his text Philosophical Faith and Revelation (1967) offers a
compelling critique of revelation and religious dogma while arguing that
moments of transcendence are possible through what he describes in technical
terms as ‘philosophical faith’. Jaspers’s first of two major works, Philosophy
(1932), is a three-volume set covering his philosophy of Being. It includes his
‘Philosophical World Orientation’ (vol. 1), ‘Existential Elucidation’ (vol. 2) and
‘Metaphysics’ (vol. 3). Between the publication of Philosophy and his second
major work, the aforementioned Of Truth, Jaspers was removed from his profes-
sorship at the University of Heidelberg by the Nazi regime and his relationship
with Heidegger was subsequently and irreconcilably damaged over Heidegger’s
political affiliation with National Socialism. Jasper’s small text Philosophy of

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Existence is a record of the last lectures given by him before leaving Germany in
1937 and serve as a brief introduction to his existentialism. After the Second
World War, Jaspers moved to Switzerland where he served as a professor at
University of Basel until his death in 1969.
Nick Wernicki

Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was an Austrian writer, the author of three unfinished
novels and numerous works of short fiction, generally considered to be among
the greatest of modernist literature. Relative to the strain of existentialism that
promotes an heroic and self-asserted mode of subjectivity, Kafka is far from
being an existentialist writer. On the other hand, he is unmatched in the canon
of modern fiction in invoking the absurdity of the human situation in a mean-
ingless world.
In Kafka’s work, this world lacking in its own ultimate significance none-
theless appears to his various protagonists (whether human, animal or the
other peculiar animates of Kafka’s thought) as having a hidden meaning. Their
situation is at once eccentric and unfounded. In ‘Investigations of a Dog’, the
titular character recalls how, as a young dog, he was ‘filled with a premonition
of great things – a premonition that may well have been delusional, for I
always had it’.
The principle theme of Kafka’s work is the interminable search or process,
the attempt to arrive at the locus of meaning that does not exist. The friction
between the attempt and the lack of a real goal, the dynamic of an investment
that is confounded, though not entirely, at every point, is what gives force to
much of his work.
The correlate of this theme is that of a baroque and, since ultimately
ungrounded, necessarily cruel set of laws, customs and bureaucracies, whose
significance and authority remains mysterious to those trapped within
them.
Jon Roffe

Kierkegaard

Among the epithets bestowed on Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) have been

‘the master of irony’, ‘the melancholy Dane’ and ‘the father of existentialism’.
All are in some respects valid, but also potentially misleading. His Master’s
thesis on Socratic irony witnesses to his fascination with the theme of irony
and he proved an able exponent of it in his own writing. Yet he insisted that

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his central concerns called for a serious or ‘earnest’ approach to life. For
many readers, Kierkegaard is all too serious, since themes of melancholy,
anxiety, boredom and despair pervade such works as Either/Or, Repetition,
The Concept of Anxiety, Stages on Life’s Way and The Sickness unto Death. His
portrayal of Romantic aestheticism shows a form of existence in which such
moods dominated and eventually extinguished the self. However, he also
argued that the self was capable of choosing itself in such a way as to escape
these states and, in a decisive ‘moment of vision’, of realizing its potential
freedom.
A preliminary form of such choice is seen in the ‘ethical’ view of life pro-
moted in the second part of Either/Or. Yet Kierkegaard regarded this as inad-
equate for dealing with the extreme form of despair that Christianity calls sin
and from which we can only be redeemed by faith in Christ as Saviour. Thus,
while Kierkegaard speaks of the three stages of the aesthetic, the ethical and
the religious, the religious stage is further subdivided between a kind of reli-
giousness (‘religiousness A’) that is compatible with general human experi-
ence and the specifically Christian religiousness (‘religiousness B’) that
depends on faith. Kierkegaard himself did not use the expression ‘leap of
faith’ often ascribed to him but he did understand faith as involving a leap
beyond the intellectual horizon of any merely immanent philosophical sys-
tem. One of his principle complaints against Hegelianism is precisely that it
tries to think of God in concepts drawn from immanence and thus reduces
theology to anthropology – as became explicit in Feuerbach. These religious
themes are particularly developed in such pseudonymous works as Philo-
sophical Fragments (or Crumbs), Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Training in
Christianity and The Sickness unto Death as well as in the so-called upbuilding
or Christian discourses that he published alongside the pseudonymous
works.
In all his writings Kierkegaard was clear that the decisive issues in human
life could not be adequately dealt with at the theoretical level but had to be
engaged with existentially, as matters of urgent concern to the existing
human being, whom he portrayed as thoroughly temporal and confronted
by the ineluctable yet unthinkable reality of death. In the 1920s it was pre-
cisely this Kierkegaardian sense of ‘existence’ that would give its title to the
philosophical movement associated with Jaspers and Heidegger, who also
made extensive use of such Kierkegaardian concepts as anxiety, concern,
guilt, repetition and the moment of vision. However, Heidegger rejected
Kierkegaard’s religious conclusions and the extent to which existentialism
can also be Christian remains debatable. For Kierkegaard himself, it couldn’t
be anything else.
George Pattison

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Laing

R. D. Laing (1927–1989). See the chapter ‘Existentialism, Psychotherapy and

Psychoanalysis’.

Look

Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness (1943) that there is an original relation
with the Other, which he calls ‘the look’. The look is not just visual: it can be ‘a
rustling of branches . . . or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement
of a curtain’. In apprehending a look of the Other we become aware of being
looked at. Sartre’s best-known example concerns the phenomenon of shame.
He writes: ‘Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just
glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. . . . But all of a sudden
I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me!’ The sound transforms
the relation to the self by revealing the presence of the Other. When looking
through the keyhole the person is totally involved in the situation, but when
they are looked at by the Other they are judged. In shame, pride or fear, we
experience ourselves as objects and experience the subjectivity of the Other.
Phenomena like these show that there are other consciousnesses. Through the
look, we live the situation of being looked at, while gaining object-ness, which
is a kind of being. However, this is an unhappy consciousness, Sartre argues,
because the individual loses the freedom that depends upon their transcendent
subjectivity. The look leads to conflict in relations with others as we try to affirm
ourselves at their expense. Thus, for Sartre, the structure of the look governs
our concrete relations with others, as in relating to others one is either looker
(subject) or looked at (object).
Marguerite La Caze

Marcel

Widely considered to be the first French existentialist, Gabriel Honoré Marcel

(1889–1973) was a unique voice among existentialists. Marcel was a true intel-
lectual who enjoyed professional success as a philosopher, playwright, literary
critic and concert pianist. Marcel’s lifelong fascination with death was impacted
especially by the loss of his mother prior to his fourth birthday, as well as by his
experiences as a non-combatant soldier in the First World War. Marcel’s philo-
sophical training was overseen at the Sorbonne by Henri Bergson, although
Marcel’s early writing also reveals a particular attraction to William James’s
pragmatism, the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and Spinoza. He

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flirted with idealism throughout his career, and although he bristled at attempts
to categorize his philosophy, he often referred to his thinking as neo-Socratic.
As Marcel developed philosophically, his work was marked by an empha-
sis on the concrete, on lived experience. He argued that life was absurd, but
that no person was qualified to argue (as he thought Heidegger did) that the
entire created system was tragic. Meaninglessness instead comes from the
human propensity towards materialism and self-destruction. The individual
buys into the idea that she is only a natural machine, and so is nothing more
than the functions she can perform. People are thereby degraded by under-
standing the human condition as accidental and merely functional. Human
despair is a by-product of living a rational – rather than a reflective – life. The
role of the philosopher should not be to offer systematic justification for a life
of indifference, but rather to testify that the ‘logic of death’ (as Marcel called
it) could be overcome through proper reflection, creative acts and relation-
ships that are committed to defeating injustice in the world.
Effective philosophical practice will lead, on Marcel’s view, to religious com-
mitment and, indeed, Marcel’s existentialism suffered the label of ‘Christian
existentialism’ – a label he came to revile. Even prior to his conversion to
Catholicism at the age of 40, however, Marcel had become a noted opponent of
atheistic existentialism, especially that of Sartre. Although their relationship as
young adults was amicable, as Sartre grew in fame, Marcel became more vocal
in his dissent towards Sartre’s characterizations of the isolated self, of the death
of God, and of lived experience as having ‘no exit’. Marcel agreed that humans
are naturally and tragically alienated from others, but he ultimately rejected
Sartre’s conception of man. Sartre’s existentialism leads to the simultaneous
exaltation and abasement of the self, since a person must be self-dependent like
a god and, at the same time, the refuse of an inconceivable universe.
Marcel’s conception of freedom is the most philosophically enduring of all
of his themes, although the last decade has seen a resurgence of attention paid
to Marcel’s metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. It can be difficult to system-
atize Marcel’s work, in large part because the main Marcelian themes are so
interconnected. A close read, however, shows that in addition to that of free-
dom, Marcel’s important philosophical contributions were on the themes of
problem and mystery, participation, reflection, creative fidelity and presence.
Jill Graper Hernandez

May

In 1958, Rollo May (1909–1994), Ernst Angel and Henri F. Ellenberger intro-
duced existential psychology and psychiatry to America in the ground-break-
ing text Existence. May’s work initiated a turn from clinical, behavioural

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psychology relying on technical reason towards a psychology that recognizes

human beings as being-in-the-world through the integration of existential phi-
losophy, ontology and phenomenological psychology. May distinguishes three
interrelated ‘modes of being’ in which human beings live simultaneously: (1)
the Umwelt, about which traditional psychoanalysis of the period was primarily
concerned, is categorized by instinctual drives and biological determinism and
is the mode in which Freud makes his most important contributions; (2) the
Mitwelt, which May argues is underconceptualized by traditional psychoanaly-
sis, is categorized by the interrelationships between human beings; (3) the
Eigenwelt, which May argues is largely ignored in modern and depth psychol-
ogy, is categorized by the self in relation to itself.
May argues that existential psychotherapy moves beyond traditional psy-
chotherapy by penetrating all three ‘modes of being’, thus responding to Nietz-
sche and Kierkegaard’s claim that the well-spring of anxiety for human beings
is the loss of a sense of self and a loss of world. May’s Columbia University dis-
sertation, published as The Concept of Anxiety (1950), illustrates the relationship
between anxiety and the development of selfhood. The dissertation was super-
vised by the famous philosophical theologian Tillich, who became May’s life-
long mentor. After Tillich’s death May wrote Paulus: A Spiritual Teacher (1973), a
devotional biography of Tillich; his influence can be recognized throughout
May’s work. May co-authored his last major text The Psychology of Existence: An
Integrative Clinical Perspective (1995) before his death in 1994.
Nick Wernicki

Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was a leading figure in the movement of

existentialist phenomenology. His major work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
criticizes both the intellectualist and empiricist traditions. Merleau-Ponty argues
that both traditions misconstrue the subject’s relation to the world. For the intel-
lectualists, the subject is able to discover knowledge of the world through
thought alone, independent of the subject’s interpretations and individual con-
cerns. For the empiricists, knowledge about the world can be discovered through
experience. Both these accounts lead to a radical bifurcation between the knower
and the known and distort the way we experience the world. For Merleau-Ponty,
these accounts are mistaken because our subjective embodiment – our sensory
and cognitive make-up – structure the way the world appears to us in a funda-
mental way.
Drawing on Husserl and Heidegger’s works on phenomenology, Merleau-
Ponty demonstrates how phenomenology is able to offer a more unified
account between objectivity and consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s most

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significant contribution was to emphasize the mediating role of the body in

perception, and the way in which our background subjective assumptions are
involved in all acts of understanding and interpretation. For Merleau-Ponty,
we are not as disengaged and unaffected by the world and others as Descartes’s
theory of the subject implies. Nor do we experience our bodies as extensions of
our minds. As Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Descartes and particularly Kant detached
the subject . . . they presented consciousness, the absolute certainty of my exis-
tence for myself, as the condition of there being anything at all.’ The problem
here is that experience of the world is conceived as something separate from
the subject that experiences it.
Phenomenology, by contrast, and by virtue of its very method of describing
experiences, demonstrates the way in which the subject is already embedded in
and affected by the world and others by virtue of its embodiment. For Merleau-
Ponty, the aim of phenomenology is to reach an undistorted ‘pure’ description
of experience: ‘it tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, with-
out taking account of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which
the scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able to provide.’ This ‘man-
ner or style of thinking’ discloses to us certain existential facts: that ‘our fate is
in our hands’, that we are ‘responsible for our history through reflection’ and by
the ‘decisions on which we stake our life’. Phenomenology thus aims to demon-
strate the manner in which our existence is meaningfully lived.
Merleau-Ponty also wrote about a number of other subjects including poli-
tics, aesthetics, psychology, history and biology. His first book, Structure of
Behaviour (1942) engaged with and criticized the ‘Gestalt’ school of psychology.
In 1947, he published Humanism and Terror, revealing a conflict between his
commitments to Marxist socialism and revelations of Soviet repression. Other
works include Sense and Nonsense (1948), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) and
Signs (1960). His final work, The Visible and the Invisible, was published after his
sudden death in 1961.
Sarah Sorial

Mood

Kierkegaard was pivotal in the emergence of mood as a key philosophical

theme and not simply a psychological curiosity. In Kierkegaardian thought, the
centrality of the individual’s emotional life flows from his emphasis on spirit in
the context of subjective innerness, and this is a theme of great importance for
his ontology of the self and his explorations of its various stages of existence.
His pseudonymous works explore such key moods as the melancholy of the
aesthete, the centrality of anxiety (which was critically important for later exis-
tentialist thought) and the ontological misrelation (imbalance) of despair. For

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Kierkegaard, such moods are at the heart of the nobility and the tragedy of
human being, and are of central importance for the awakening of spirit.
Mood (Stimmung) is no less central for Heidegger, albeit in a different key.
Ontologically, he characterizes the everyday phenomenon of mood as ‘state-of-
mind’ (Befindlichkeit: that is, the state in which one finds oneself). For Heide-
gger, moods are not incidental emotional states that impact on mental faculties;
rather they are primordial and ubiquitous modes of being-in-the-world through
which the world is disclosed to Dasein. Insofar as we always already find our-
selves opened out on the world in a given state of mind, our moods are a basic
aspect of our thrownness into the world. Two states-of-mind receive particular
attention as ‘basic moods’: anxiety and boredom. Unlike moods such as fear or
loathing, anxiety and boredom have no particular objects, and as such they
transcend ontic importance and reveal the existential structure of Dasein’s
being-in-the-world. In anxiety, for example, Dasein finds itself in an uncanny
state that paradoxically opens the possibility of authentic existence.
Richard Colledge

Mystery (see Problem and Mystery)

Nausea

Sartre tackles the notion of nausea in his novel of the same name published in
1938. Its main character, Antoine Roquentin, suffers from nausea as things
have lost their meaning for him. He says that the world has lost its veneer. That
means that when he looks at things, they do not make sense anymore. Things
begin to ‘exist’ rather than to ‘be’, and he is confronted with their incompre-
hensibility. Being faced with the absurdity of the world, devoid of human
meaning, is a trigger for nausea. For human consciousness, it is nauseating to
suddenly be faced with the being that supports the world we are familiar with.
For example, when Roquentin is sitting on a bench in a public park, probably
the most famous passage of the novel, the garden disappears from his view
and he then becomes conscious of the being that lies behind the humanly
ordered and meaningful ‘garden’. The garden is such because human con-
sciousnesses have given this portion of being that particular meaning. But, as
Roquentin notes, the realm of being is not that of words and reasons. Suffering
from nausea is an indication that a human being has had a glance at the funda-
mental contingency of the world. It is the outcome of the confrontation between
the human desire to give meaning to things and the fundamental absence of
such meaning. In that sense, the nausea suffered by Roquentin is similar to
what Albert Camus describes as absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus (1943).
Christine Daigle

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Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is one of the most influential philosophers in

modern culture as well as a significant thinker in the existentialist tradition. His
work was initially regarded as that of a literary stylist and cultural critic, and
then as a forerunner of German existential thought (Max Scheler, Jaspers,
Heidegger) and French existentialism (Camus and Sartre). The Nazis tried to
appropriate Nietzsche, despite his prescient criticisms of German nationalism
and anti-Semitism. Postwar philosophers, especially in France, turned to Nietz-
sche as an alternative to prevailing currents of phenomenology, Hegelian–
Marxism and positivism. There is lively current interest in Nietzsche from a
wide range of perspectives.
Deeply influenced by Schopenhauer and romantic composer Richard Wag-
ner, Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), argued that art was the
product of two dynamic drives: towards form and individuation (expressed by
the Greek god Apollo); and towards formlessness and disintegration (expressed
by the god Dionysus). Tragic art is born of the union of Apollonian and Diony-
sian impulses, but is superseded by more reflective kinds of drama. According
to Nietzsche, modern culture is in need of a rebirth of tragic art (like Wagner’s
operas) because it is suffering from an excess of ‘Socratic optimism’ (the view
that existence is rationally knowable and thus morally meaningful). If we are to
overcome the crisis of meaning in modernity, we should renew the Greek ‘tragic
view’ of life (that existence lacks intrinsic meaning, and so must be given value
through philosophy, art and culture).
In On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche argued that Western culture
has inherited two opposing modes of moral–ethical evaluation. There is master
morality, in which the dominant masters affirm their own goodness (their power
and nobility), while devaluing slaves and inferiors as ‘bad’. And there is slave
morality, in which the slaves designate the masters as ‘evil’, and thus redeem
themselves (the weak or inferior) as the ‘good’. Nietzsche argued that master
morality (Greek virtue ethics) was overthrown by slave morality (Christianity),
and that modern secular culture was still governed by Christian morality and
Platonic metaphysics, which together foster ressentiment (resentment) against
life, time and robust flourishing.
Nietzsche is most famous for his reflections on nihilism, expressed in the
well-known phrase, ‘God is dead’. He was the first thinker to give ‘nihilism’ a
philosophical interpretation that combined a critical diagnosis of modern cul-
ture with a critique of ‘Platonic’ (two-world) metaphysics and (Christian)
morality. For Nietzsche, nihilism means ‘that the highest values devalue them-
selves’. It arises because of the attempt to find meaning in existence by means
of a life-negating metaphysics. Once religion is challenged by science, and

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human nature is shown to be contingent, the ultimate sources of morality are

undermined (‘God is dead’). Various substitute ‘idols’ are then posited to fill
the void (belief in science, progress, humanity, reason or freedom) but these
too are sceptically devalued over time. Nietzsche attacked Christian morality
and modern ‘democratic’ culture for being nihilistic: destructive of the dynam-
ics of human vitality and cultural creativity. We need, therefore, to overcome
nihilistic forms of morality, culture and metaphysics, in favour of life-affirm-
ing perspectives that would make possible a post-metaphysical form of life.
Robert Sinnerbrink

Nothingness

One of the key questions motivating existentialism is: what is it to have our
kind of being? Existentialism draws our attention to a fundamental difference
of our being to other kinds of beings: we are ‘existing’ entities, which are essen-
tially always outside and beyond themselves, and as such, are not grounded.
Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard and Camus understand that which is not grounded
as facing an abyss of nothingness. This is meaninglessness, and being aware of it
typically takes the form of an experience such as angst.
The ontological significance of nothingness is analysed by Heidegger and Sar-
tre. Heidegger understands our existence as being-in-the-world. Anxiety arises
when the background of all the meaningful involvements, that is, the world itself,
comes into view. This reveals that there is nothing beyond the world. Anxiety is,
therefore, the fear of no-thing. This experience is the key to authenticity. For Sar-
tre, it remains to be explained how nothingness as the negation of the whole of
being can come into existence. He observes that negations such as ‘Pierre’s
absence’ are, in fact, located among beings, and as such constitutive of reality.
They originate from the for-itself which Sartre describes as its own nothingness.
Nothingness is thus what separates the for-itself from the fullness of being of the
in-itself (see being-in-itself/being-for-itself). In negation, the for-itself dissoci-
ates itself from the order of causality and reveals itself as free. Anguish arises from
the awareness of this freedom. It is not fear, as it has no object, but rather the
experience of confronting the nothingness within the for-itself.
Christian Onof

Nihilism

The term ‘nihilism’ (from the Latin, nihil, meaning ‘nothing’) refers to the doctrine
that existence lacks meaning, that truth is illusory, or that morality is groundless.
It was introduced into philosophy by Friedrich Jacobi in his Letter to Fichte (1799).
For Jacobi, Kantian idealism led to the sceptical self-undermining of knowledge

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and morality. If all of our claims are dependent upon reason, and reason is
grounded in self-consciousness, our knowledge and morality lack an absolute
foundation. Idealism thus leads to transcendental egoism or nihilism (all claims
reduce to our own arbitrary positing).
Hegel elaborated this insight into the sceptical consequences of Enlighten-
ment reason. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel remarks that traditional
religious faith can no longer provide an authoritative source of meaning and
value in a rational, historically self-conscious world. Alienated modern subjects
experience this loss of divine substance and substantial selfhood as the ‘death of
God’. The task of reconciliation formerly played by religion is now taken over by
rational self-reflection.
Nietzsche developed the concept of nihilism most fully, famously expressed
in the phrase, ‘God is dead’. For Nietzsche, nihilism is a cultural, moral and
philosophical condition in which ‘the highest values devalue themselves’. It
arises when we devalue this-worldly existence in favour of an (unavailable)
transcendent source of truth (God). Once religion is challenged by science, and
human nature is shown to be contingent, these transcendent sources of moral-
ity are undermined. Nietzsche argued that we must, therefore, traverse modern
nihilism in order to overcome nihilistic forms of morality, culture and meta-
physics via life-affirming perspectives, heralding a post-metaphysical form of
life. Nihilism became a central theme for many later existential philosophers,
including Heidegger, Sartre and Camus.
Robert Sinnerbrink

Ontic/Ontological

Heidegger distinguishes two levels of analyses: the ontic and the ontological.
What is ‘ontological’ (Ontologisch), for Heidegger, are the structures of Being that
make particular beings possible. In Being and Time (1927), these are Dasein’s ‘care’
(Sorge), its being-in-the-world, and the finitude and temporality of Being itself.
The ‘ontic’ (ontisch), on the other hand, is akin to the empirical occurrences that
make up our existence. Heidegger refers to the ontological structures of Dasein as
‘existential’ (existenzial), while referring to its ontic doings as ‘existentielle’ (existen-
ziell). Thus, while Dasein, the being that we ourselves are, has the ontological–exis-
tential structure of care – it is always involved in the world whether or not it cares
about people or things in the everyday sense – ontically it may be indifferent or
engaged, withdrawn, or attentive. For the most part, Heidegger argues, Dasein is
ensnared in its everyday concerns, but nevertheless ‘the ontical distinction of
Dasein lies in the fact that it is ontological’. Thus one of our ontic concerns – one of
paramount importance to Heidegger – is the ability of Dasein to ask after the mean-
ing of its existence. In this way, the ontological and the ontic are not two levels

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of reality: Dasein is never wholly ‘ontic’ (it is never just what it does, since it
is always on the way towards further possibilities), nor is Dasein wholly
‘ontological’, since its ‘care’ is always turned towards its ‘ontic’ concerns.
Sartre late takes up this distinction in Being and Nothingness in terms of the
‘ontological level’ of human being in the world and the ‘phenomenological’
considerations of the ontic particulars of our lives.
Peter Gratton

Ortega

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). See the chapter ‘Existentialism and Latin
America’.

Other

The other is a term in existential philosophy that refers to any individual other
than oneself. It is meant to capture the experience of radical separation that one
can feel when encountering another person. The other presents himself or her-
self to me as beyond my awareness and beyond my control. This view has its
roots in Descartes and gives rise in analytic philosophy to what is known as the
problem of other minds. But in existential thought it also implies that the other
is a threat. For the other is always free to construe me in any way. I can never
know how the other is construing me, nor can I have control over this
construal.
Sartre, who is best known for this line of thought, describes this situation by
saying that conflict is the meaning of ‘being-for-others’. This conflict arises
because in any encounter there is the attempt both to see the other as an object
(rather than a person) and to escape being seen as an object by the other. The
basis of this conflict is the desire to maintain one’s sense of freedom, something
one finds it difficult to do when one is aware that one is being seen as an object.
Also, by seeing the other as an object I achieve the sense that the other is not free
to construe me as an object; for if the other is seen as an object then he or she is
experienced as something that cannot construe me in any sense.
James Giles

Problem and Mystery

The basic distinction grounding the method of Marcel is between problem and
mystery. Marcel grew wary of systematic philosophy that dislocates the existential

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character of experience from philosophical issues, because it makes the question of

being a problem to be solved, rather than a mystery with which to be engaged.
Problems are objective and detached, and are the sorts of things that can
(at least in principle) be solved. Problems are defused by analysing facts,
sharpening the language used to assess the issues, and detaching the self
from the problem at hand. Since the distinctive feature of problems is that
they can be completely met and defeated, they can also be reduced or mini-
mized. In addition, when answers are sought for problems we come across,
the solutions we find become common property, so that they can be verified
and rediscovered by any person.
Due in part to materialism, technology, and the dominance of philosophical
and scientific methodology, Marcel contends that the question of being has been
reduced to the level of a problem. The self and all of its relationships, goals and
desires are treated as obstacles to be conquered. When life dissolves into a series
of opportunities to problem-solve, however, the result is that the body is alien-
ated from the self and becomes yet another object. This alienation allows people
to either be possessed as objects or viewed in terms of mere functionality. If the
only aspect of being that the self knows is the fact of existence, the question of
what it means to be in the world is answered by asserting that the self exists.
Such a person – the ‘problematic person’ – invariably is shut out of meaningful
experiences by the reduction of everything in life to the fact of existence.
Mystery, however, collapses the gap between experiences and what is essen-
tial to the self. Whereas problems are characterized by solvability, a mystery
must be thought of as something in which the self is caught up and whose fun-
damental nature is, therefore, not entirely accessible. That is not to say that the
mysterious is unknowable, however, since unknowability is a limiting feature
of a problem. Conversely, the recognition of mystery is a positive act of the
mind, apprehended through intuition without an immediate knowledge that
the self possesses it. Mystery is intuited when experiences slowly illuminate it.
Marcel does not mean to bring a vague literary floweriness to the discourse on
mystery; rather, the mystery of our being involves the situations we are concerned
with – our experiences – and as such, the nature of mystery can only be grasped,
acknowledged or recognized from the inside.
In order to illuminate (rather than clarify, as we would a problem) the
mystery of being, we must start with the experiences of the individual and
gradually move out to the individual’s experiences with other persons. Expe-
riences provide a resource for a phenomenological exploration that allows us
to achieve what Marcel calls ‘plenitude’, or the full life. Plenitude, of course,
can never be achieved by the abstractions and objectifications of the prob-
lematic person. Instead, the full life is a goal accessible only to individuals
who break out of problematicity.
Jill Graper Hernandez

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Pareyson

Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991) was a seminal Italian philosopher who introduced

existentialism to Italy (La filosofia dell’esistenza e Carlo Jaspers, 1939). According to
Pareyson, the main features that characterize the philosophy of existence are
‘the revaluation of the singular, ontologicity, and the concept of situation’. In
his elaboration of these themes, Pareyson mainly refers to Jaspers and Marcel.
The singular, or person, is conceived as a paradoxical coincidence of a relation
with the self and a relation with Being. This is the reason why Pareyson names
his philosophy of existence ontological personalism. Maintaining the relation with
Being is an existential commitment, and this commitment is fidelity to Being.
In 1971 Pareyson published Verità e Interpretazione, which represents the evo-
lution of his existentialism into one of the most impressive hermeneutic theo-
ries in contemporary philosophy. If reality is accessible only through personal
existence, every human act or thought is an interpretation. Interpretation is not
only a particular kind of knowledge but the constitutive feature of all human
activity, and thus it can be extended from the problem of the knowledge of
things to the problem of interpersonal relationships: interpretation is ‘knowl-
edge of forms by persons’. The relation with truth is a hermeneutic relation, in
which the link with truth is total and the formulation is personal, so that the
interpretation necessarily entails an ontological feature. Pareyson’s theory of
interpretation culminates in the principle of the inexhaustibility of truth, thus
founding the possibility of a pluralistic – but not relativistic – conception of
truth: ‘there is nothing but interpretation of truth and there is no interpretation
of anything but truth’.
The core of the hermeneutic relation is freedom, as the possibility of fidelity
to Being and at the same time as the possibility to break the bond with Being.
In Pareyson’s late writings, his personalistic existentialism, his anti-relativistic
hermeneutics and his ontology of freedom are combined and elaborated in
light of his reading of Heidegger and Schelling to form a reflection on the
problem of evil. His last unfinished work, Ontology of Freedom, was published
posthumously in 1995. As a professor of philosophy at the University of Turin,
he had many famous students, including Gianni Vattimo and Umberto Eco. A
collection of Pareyson’s selected writings has been recently translated into
English, under the title Existence, Interpretation, Freedom.
Paolo Diego Bubbio

Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1632–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist and philoso-

pher. His interests in philosophy and religion took a turn when as an adult he

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nearly lost his life in an incident in which his carriage almost fell off a bridge.
After this event he devoted his life to Christianity and produced religious and
philosophical writings such as Provincial Letters (1656–1657) and his famous
Pensées (1656–1658).
Pensées is a collection of personal thoughts on topics like religion, fear, death,
despair and hope. It is a work that is a forerunner to modern existential philoso-
phy. Probably the best-known section in the work is where Pascal argues that
since there is neither definitive proof for or against the existence of God, one
must gamble and make a choice of whether to believe or not to believe. He then
argues that if one chooses to believe in God and God exists, then one has every-
thing to gain (eternal happiness in heaven), whereas if one chooses not to
believe and God exists, then one has everything to loose (eternal damnation in
hell). Therefore, one ought to believe.
This argument, known as Pascal’s wager, ushers in the existential approach
to religion – one that was taken up by Kierkegaard – by shifting the focus
away from the objective existence of God and towards the individual’s belief.
The main problem with the argument, however, is that it is unclear how
someone can choose to believe in something that he or she might see as obvi-
ously false.
James Giles

Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was a German poet and novelist whose often
exquisite and sometimes disquieting presentations of existential necessities has
lent his works to an existentialist interpretation. The interpretation was first
suggested by Otto Friedrich Bollnow in Rilke (1951), with the most notable
example being Walter Kaufmann’s From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959).
Kaufman compares Rilke to Nietzsche on four shared motifs: the acute aware-
ness of their own embeddedness in a historical situation; the redirection of piety
away from traditionalist mores and towards an open future; the resolve to
affirm life and with it the identity of ‘terribleness and bliss’; and their repudia-
tion of otherworldliness. Rilke’s repudiation was neither positivistic nor atheis-
tic, but a subtle treatment of desire and despair, accompanied by an affirmation
of the creative potentials therein.
The Duino Elegies, which together with the Sonnets to Orpheus is often con-
sidered the zenith of Rilke’s work, opens with: ‘If I cried out, who would hear
me up there, among the angelic orders?’ A central theme of Rilke’s poetry is
human longing for communion with the ineffable, a longing frustrated by
doubt and anxiety, but which ultimately addresses future potentials as divine.
His Ninth Elegy poses the question: ‘why then still insist on being human?’ He

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responds: ‘because to be here means so much’, and because ‘it’s one time for
each thing and only one. Once and no more. And the same for us: once.’ Rilke
calls on us to be responsible for our authenticity through a recollection of our
finitude. One of the consequences of this recognition is that we choose to live
‘abandoned and exposed’ to the ‘blissfully earthly’, the earth which regains
for Rilke the attributes that he once assigned to God.
To do justice to the existential depth and potential of Rilke’s poetry it is
best to resist extracting philosophical theses and instead focus on the moods
and experiences his poetry manifests (of homelessness, of anguish, of the
recognition of the necessity of one’s own death and the importance of soli-
tude) and how they incite existentialist insights. Rilke’s non-fiction works
Letters to a Young Poet and the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (often thought
to anticipate Sartre’s Nausea) will give the reader another avenue to his
thoughts. But the eloquence and intricacy with which Rilke expressed the
consequences of these thoughts in his poetry made him an influence on exis-
tentialists, such as Heidegger, and encourages us to include him in the exis-
tentialist tradition.
Sherah Bloor

Responsibility

In general existentialist terms, responsibility may be defined as the conscious

awareness of the freely choosing self as the sole author of a given project or
moment. Responsibility is, therefore, potentially understood from this perspec-
tive as weighing upon existence, insofar as it inescapably attends our efforts
and projects, but responsibility also reveals itself as a transcendence. We are
forced to confront the extent to which we are responsible for our freely chosen
transcendence, thereby leaving us open to experiencing angst.
Friedrich Nietzsche imbued the concept with a typically elevated sensibility,
seeking in particular to position ‘heavy’ responsibilities taken on in a life-af-
firming spirit and in pursuit of a ‘unifying project’ as befitting (and indeed,
indicative of) the capabilities of Higher Men. Kierkegaard understood respon-
sibility in terms of his Christian faith. For Kierkegaard, Christian faith is a mat-
ter of individual subjective passion; only on the basis of faith is an individual
able to become an authentic self. This self is the sum of our creative efforts,
which God judges for eternity.
Initially, Sartre held that we are responsible insofar as meaning and value in
the world are assigned by virtue of our life-orienting fundamental ‘project’.
Later, he would come to incorporate individual responsibility into class rela-
tionships, thereby adding an existentialist dimension of ethical responsibility
to a Marxist emphasis on collective creativity. De Beauvoir understood

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responsibility in a more ‘immediate’ collective sense, such that we would

deliberately will ourselves and others free.
Steven Churchill

Ressentiment

Ressentiment (resentment) features in Nietzsche’s account of the emergence of

human subjectivity in On the Genealogy of Morality. Ressentiment is a slow poison
that permeates the perspective of the weak in relation to the strong. It fuels the
hatred of the powerless towards the powerful, ultimately leading to ‘their’
dubious victory and construct – the moral subject. Ressentiment is absent from
the carefree pleasures of the powerful, who have no need to resent anything
outside themselves.
The distinction between those who experience ressentiment and those who do
not is borne out in two different modes of creating value. The powerful exercise a
‘noble’ way of arriving at value, through the affirmative ascription of goodness to
themselves. A consequence of this active way of creating value is that its other
(the bad) is secondary and contingent. The powerless, by contrast, depend upon
negation and denigration of the other in order to create value. The notion of good-
ness in the ‘slave morality’ of the weak is parasitic on damning amorality as evil.
Virtue arises from (moral) restraint, from not doing something that others do.
The goodness of slave morality thus depends upon the construction of evil,
whereas noble goodness depends only upon itself. Nietzsche sees the invention
of (slave) morality as an imaginary revenge, for the uncensored exercise of
power is called evil by those who are by definition unable to exercise power. It
is the hollow victory of ressentiment.
Philipa Rothfield

Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a philosopher, novelist, playwright and politi-

cal activist. He was responsible for popularizing existentialism and for expand-
ing the scope of phenomenological reflection to include descriptions of ordinary
human action. Sartre’s most significant contribution is his analysis of the nature
of human freedom and how human relationships are structured by it. Sartre’s
fundamental insight is the concept of contingency. The recognition that there is
no God or deity means that there is no overarching plan to the world and no
intrinsic meaning to events. Being just is, but it does not have to be. Moreover,
there is no essence to being a human being, no predetermined or fixed human
nature. Sartre defines existence in terms of freedom. His major philosophical

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work, Being and Nothingness (1943) and his plays and novels seek to explore the
psychological and moral implications of the fact that there is no intrinsic mean-
ing to existence.
In Being and Nothingness Sartre gives an account of three fundamental types
of being: being-in-itself, being-for-itself and being-for-others. Being-in-itself
refers to non-conscious entities or brute matter. Sartre describes it as being ‘glued
to itself’ because unlike consciousness, being-in-itself cannot transcend itself. In
Sartre’s words: ‘it is an immanence which cannot realize itself, an affirmation
which cannot affirm itself, an activity which cannot act, because it is glued to
itself.’ The world of the in-itself is superfluous because it has no meaning inde-
pendent of consciousness. Being-for-itself refers to consciousness. It is being-for-
itself that gives meaning to things by virtue of the projects that it pursues. Unlike
the in-itself, the for-itself is temporal, and defined in terms of possibility and
transcendence. The for-itself is characterized as nothingness, and thus, as abso-
lute freedom. Because there is no essence to existence, the for-itself must make
itself what it is, or it must choose its condition. It is able to do this because human
consciousness is free, in the sense that it can be anything. But consciousness can
never be reduced to its choice or limited by its condition. The for-itself must
transcend itself towards a particular possibility, becoming something that has
not yet been realized. The failure to own up to this freedom and the failure to
thus choose oneself is, for Sartre, an act of bad faith or self-deception.
The third type of being is being-for-others. This refers to the realm of intersub-
jective relations. Unlike the relationship between the for-itself and the in-itself,
the relationship between the for-itself and others is inherently conflicted. The
conflict arises because the other is also a consciousness with its own possibili-
ties; that is, the other is also an absolute freedom. In the encounter with the
other, the freedom of the for-itself is at stake, because the other can make the
for-itself an object, thus limiting its freedom. The antagonism that lies at the
heart of all human relations is depicted in one of Sartre’s most famous plays, No
Exit (1944). The political and ethical implications of Sartre’s existentialism are
also explored in The Flies (1942), in a series of lectures presented in 1945 and
published under the title Existentialism and Humanism and in Anti-Semite and
Jew (1946), among many others.
Sarah Sorial

Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is one of the world’s great philosophers,

whose influence in modern philosophy has been greatly underappreciated. His
fundamental work The World as Will and Representation (1818) can be seen as a
precursor to important ideas in contemporary psychology, psychoanalysis,

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evolutionary theory and postmodernism, as well as in existentialism. His views

on love, death, suicide, happiness and suffering have influenced many of the
great writers of the world, including Dostoevsky, Beckett and Leo Tolstoy, yet
during his lifetime his work was almost entirely ignored or rejected.
Scholarly analysis of the influence of Schopenhauer’s work on the thinkers
he inspired is strangely lacking, despite the enormity of his influence on some
of the great thinkers of modern philosophy, such as Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud
and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Existentialism has been significantly influenced by
Schopenhauer, mainly through Nietzsche. But to find the influence of Schopen-
hauer on these twentieth-century thinkers is no easy task, and one must look
deep into the work of Schopenhauer, particularly his ethics, to find such con-
nections. While perhaps not in agreement with everything they would say (the
Sartrean motto ‘existence precedes essence’ would not feature in a Schopenhau-
rian philosophy), Schopenhauer’s philosophy resonates with that of the exis-
tentialists in grappling with the role of the individual, and with the suffering
and gloom that life seems to place on us.
William Hebblewhite

Situation

Nowhere is the general existentialist project of ‘personalizing’ the world more

evident than in the fundamental concept of situation. To talk of one’s situation
is to announce one’s perspective on their existence as it is lived in the midst of a
personally meaningful site of existence. The situation serves, then, as an ambig-
uous ground for freedom. In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre states: ‘The
situation is an ambiguous phenomenon in which it is impossible for the for-itself
to distinguish the contribution of freedom from that of the brute existent.’ Con-
sider Sartre’s example of the mountain climber: his apprehension of the crag as
‘too tall’ to scale is understood by him as a feature of the situation. In fact, he
has neglected to consider the role of freedom in giving rise to the situation now
confronting him, and the freedom he has in his situation to regard it differently,
and so to give up, or to persist, and so on. Freedom-in-situation is thusly dif-
ferentiated from freedom-of-consciousness, since transcending the immanence
of one’s situation involves unavoidable consideration of the freedom of others
in shaping one’s experience of immanence. Therefore, Sartre holds, ‘there is
freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom’. Fur-
ther, for Sartre this ‘antimony’ provides the exact relation between freedom and
facticity. Of course, the ‘exact’ relation at issue here is properly revealed as one
of ambiguity.
Sartre’s postwar Collective politics re-employs the concept of situation in the
service of a ‘philosophy of revolution’. In his essay ‘Materialism and Revolution’

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(1946) Sartre argued that ‘revolutionary behaviour’ is facilitated by, and through,
‘new [that is, recast or reconsidered] ideas of “situation” and “being in the
world”’. For Sartre, materialism (as represented by scholastic Marxism at the
time) could not accommodate and explain transcendence, as it viewed the
‘unfolding’ of a new order out of the present state of affairs as inevitable. He felt
transcendence to be crucial to analysing, and then implementing, the human
subject’s movement towards a new social order, and saw that the concept of
situation allowed for this to be articulated, since transcendence presupposes
situation, as the ground for its realization. As such, situation serves as a major
bridging concept between Sartre’s ‘apolitical’ existentialism and his ‘commit-
ted’ perspective.
Steven Churchill

Suicide

Suicide is a theme that is of concern to existentialism. For Marcel, suicide takes

a prominent position because of an inevitable attraction to ‘the void’ that must
occur in any philosophy that affirms the entirety of being. For existentialists like
Camus and Sartre suicide becomes an issue because of the absurdity of exis-
tence. An obvious response to this awareness is suicide. For if my existence is
absurd, there seems no point in my continuing to exist. So pressing is this issue
that, for Camus, the question of whether one ought to commit suicide becomes
the ‘one truly serious philosophical question’.
For Marcel, the solution to suicide is to see that the same freedom that enables
me to choose this attraction also enables me to choose the ontological-counter-
weight to suicide, namely, love. Camus’s answer is that the way of dealing with
the absurdity of life is to accept it with dignity and to draw strength from it. For
Sartre, the response is to see suicide itself as an absurdity. This is because it is
both the project that destroys all my projects and thus itself, and also because it
allows the viewpoint of the other person to take precedence over mine.
James Giles

Tillich

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) is best categorized as a philosophical theologian, under-

scoring his commitment to the dialogue between the two disciplines. Tillich’s
ongoing engagement with German Idealism is evident throughout his work.
However, his encounter with Heidegger while at Marburg and the later work of
Schelling forged the existentialism that characterizes his thinking. Tillich’s lib-
eral Christian theology is founded on the concept of ‘ultimate concern’, through

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which he broadens the category of religion to include any form of ‘being ulti-
mately concerned about one’s own being, about one’s self and one’s world,
about its meaning and its estrangement and its finitude’. Within the context of
ultimate concern, the concept of God lies beyond any theistic or symbolic Chris-
tian God as the objectless and infinite Ground of Being from which finite human
beings are fundamentally estranged; therefore, there is no necessity for a proof
of God in Tillich’s theology. In his best-known work of ontology and existential
philosophy, The Courage to Be (1952), Tillich argues that the awareness of the
ever-present threat of non-being, which is contained in being, is manifest in
anxiety over death, meaninglessness and condemnation. Anxiety and courage
are ontologically interdependent in the sense that courage is essential for the
self-affirmation of being in spite of the threat of non-being. Tillich argues that
the Ground of Being is the ultimate source of the courage to be over against the
threat of non-being, a courage that requires transcendence beyond theism. Pre-
supposing that the self is grasped by ‘ultimate concern’, the concept of God qua
object must be overcome for the anxiety of meaninglessness and doubt to be
taken into the courage to be. He argues that there can be Christian existential-
ists, insofar as they ask existential questions, but there can be no Christian exis-
tentialism because Christians answer as theists, not as existentialists. Tillich
thus rejects the distinction between atheistic and theistic existentialisms.
Tillich spent nearly two decades lecturing on philosophy and theology in Ger-
many before joining Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno at the University
of Frankfurt am Main. There he wrote The Socialist Decision (1933), which, along
with his outward opposition to the Nazi party, led to his dismissal from the Uni-
versity. Through the help of Reinhold Niebuhr he fled to the United States, where
he accepted a professorship at Union Theological Seminary (1933–1955) before
moving to Harvard University (1955–1962) and University of Chicago (1962–
1965). Tillich is best known for his three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951,
1957, 1963), in which he traces the rise of existentialism and the problem of
estrangement back to Hegel within the larger context of his Christian theology.
In his lecture Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art (1956) Tillich offers a short but
powerful treatment of modern art and existentialism. He posits Picasso’s Guer-
nica as religious art par excellence and argues that in order for art to be considered
existentialist it must reflect ‘ultimate concern’. Marking his death in 1965, the
New York Times called him ‘one of Christianity’s most influential theologians’.
Nick Wernicki

Thrownness

Heidegger coined the term ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) to indicate the way in

which Dasein finds itself always already in the world immersed in situations

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and meanings not of its own making or choosing. As such, it indicates ‘the fac-
ticity of [Dasein’s] being delivered over’. By far the dominant existential sense
in which Heidegger discusses thrownness relates to his analysis of state of
mind. Accordingly, Dasein is always in-the-world under the sway of one mood
or another; we simply find ourselves in these states through which the world is
opened for us, and we to it. In more ontic ways of speaking, it is also possible
to develop Heidegger’s notion of thrownness to speak of the inevitability of our
always already finding ourselves formed by a vast array of factors such as our
family of origin, genetic characteristics, culture, language, place in history and
society, the influence of our past actions and those of others on us, and so on. All
such factors contribute to a complex matrix that constitutes and opens (as well
as limits) our present possibilities.
Dasein never escapes its thrownness, although a genuine transformation is
possible in terms of the way it relates to it. Heidegger presents Dasein’s fallen-
ness as essentially a continuation of its thrownness: that is, being-fallen is a way
that ‘facticity lets itself be seen phenomenally’, for falling is essentially a matter
of ‘remaining in the throw’. Remaining in this ‘default position’ is characterized
by Heidegger as inauthentic. Authenticity (as ‘anticipatory resoluteness’)
involves ‘taking over’ our thrownness as our ownmost (eigentlich) project.
Nonetheless, the ‘nullity’ of our thrownness ‘permeates’ care ‘through and
through’, so that all possibilities are thrown and therefore ‘null’.
Richard Colledge

Transcendence

In general existentialist terms, human existence is revealed as transcendent

against the backdrop of the immanence, or ‘passive’ existence, of all other
objects with which we share a physical space and which delineate our situa-
tion. Our existence is marked-out as ‘active’ to the extent that we transcend the
immanence of our situation in pursuit of our freely chosen projects. On this
account, we are both immanent and transcendent at once, since our situation,
and our relation to it, is defined (at least in part) by our facticity.
Transcendence is perhaps most often referred to in discussions of the exis-
tentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir, but was also employed by both their pre-
decessors and their contemporaries. Kierkegaard understands transcendence
in terms of a ‘leap’, which would allow one to realize the ‘lie of character’ that
he claims characterizes the existence of the great majority of subjects, and to
instead become a self-realized person. This ‘leap’ is of course a ‘leap to faith’ in
its fuller sense, given that self-realization for Kierkegaard would also involve
accepting, with recourse to faith alone, the paradox of God moving from the
noumenal realm into the worldly realm, Christ’s human form. Heidegger uses

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 A–Z Glossary

the term in discussing the relationship between our human being and Being, as
well as the problem of the unity of being-in-the world.
Often, when Sartre invokes transcendence, he refers simply to the for-itself’s
going beyond the given in projecting itself, while at other times he actually calls
the for-itself a transcendence. If I turn the Other into an object for me, then they
are for me a transcendence-transcended on Sartre’s terms. On the other hand,
being-in-itself which overflows all its appearances and thus falls outside all of
my attempts to grasp it, is called a transcendent being. On this account, Sartre
may be said to view transcendence as both purely substantive, and as a process.
De Beauvoir understands transcendence in a different sense; intrinsic to her
view is a rejection of Sartre’s ontological freedom for ‘ethical freedom’ instead.
Freedom rendered in this way is to be imbued from the outset with an Other-
oriented concern that is expressed as we embrace it, such that we deliberately
will ourselves and others free. We do so by undertaking ‘constructive move-
ments’, such that we realize our transcendence not merely through the mun-
dane activities comprising day-to-day life, but through activities that lend life
meaning; mundane activity fades into relative immanence, with meaningful
activity assuming transcendent status.
Steven Churchill

Übermensch

Nietzsche introduces the notion of the Übermensch in his book Thus Spoke Zara-
thustra (1883 and 1885). This term has been variously translated as ‘superman’,
‘overman’, ‘overperson’ and ‘overhuman’. The latter is the most appropriate
translation. In German, the term is gender neutral and Nietzsche uses it to refer
to a way of being that human beings ought to aspire to. The Übermensch has often
been understood as some final stage at the end of an evolutionary ladder. Some
statements by Nietzsche may lead readers on that path, for example, when he
says that the Übermensch is to man what man is to the ape. However, a metaphor
like this merely intends to show the distance that separates the human being of
Nietzsche’s days from the Übermensch. One will be an Übermensch once one has
freed oneself from the belief in God and an otherworldly realm, once one has
accepted the ‘truth’ of the eternal return and once one has understood the world
and oneself as will to power. This is not easy, and these ‘truths’ might in fact
crush weaker human beings. Nietzsche hints that the way to Übermenshlichkeit
(overhumanness) might be reserved for only those strong spirits who will be able
to handle these ‘truths’. The handling of such truths requires an active value-cre-
ation on the part of the individual. Accepting the world and one’s place therein
means to posit oneself as a creator of values rather than passively receiving them
from a transcendent beyond. This, however, does not necessarily lead to an

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 The Bloomsbury Companion to Existentialism

elitism, and the Übermensch should not be understood as some kind of aristocratic
power figure. Rather, Nietzsche offers it as a moral ideal human beings ought to
aspire to.
Christine Daigle

Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936). See the chapter ‘Existentialism and Latin

America’.

Will to Power

The will to power is a pivotal concept in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche sees

it as the primary drive underlying all behaviour. Although there is a sense in
which the will to power expresses ‘an insatiable desire to manifest power’, there
are important differences between its various manifestations. Nietzsche makes
much of these differences. He is particularly critical of the ways in which cer-
tain forms of the will to power conspire against life, inhibiting the latter’s
growth and expansion. These ‘nihilistic’ manifestations of the will to power
cluster around the feeling of ressentiment and the creation of ‘slave morality’.
Nihilistic diminutions of the will to power can be contrasted with those affirma-
tive manifestations of the will to power that embrace and enhance life. Were
human inhibitions to be overcome, life would simply grow and expand, giving
way to new impositions, new and creative urges which Nietzsche idealizes
through the figure of the Übermensch.
Understood ontologically, the will to power is Nietzsche’s vision of reality
understood as becoming, rather than being. It is a principle of explanation
which is immanent, rather than transcendent. It is the generative principle that
inheres in all that occurs, the driving force behind all events. The will to power
is neither an act of human will nor a scientific form of causality. Rather, it is
embedded within events as their organizing principle. Nietzsche understands
reality as, at bottom, a clash of forces in an endless flux of becoming. The will to
power is that which imposes itself in the midst of these forces. It is interpreta-
tive, formative and creative, working between and among forces, gauging their
relative strengths and resistances, shaping the chaotic forces of the world into
temporarily stable structures, and disrupting these structures through the pro-
duction of new events, in an endless cycle of eternal return.
Philipa Rothfield

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