There is a tendency in the secondary texts to focus narrowly on the ‘big four,’ Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. This approach is understandable given the enormous philosophical and cultural impact of these figures, but it tends to overlook the significance of religious and literary existentialists such as Dostoevsky, Camus, Tolstoy, Marcel, Unamuno, and Buber, as well as feminist figures such as Beauvoir. In some introductions, the influence of Nietzsche's philosophy is minimized because he rejects one of the central tenets of existentialism, namely that human beings are radically free and, therefore, morally responsible for their actions. There are also crucial themes of embodiment and being-in-the-world that are often undeveloped, and there is sometimes a failure to situate existentialism within the historical context of modernity. Finally, there is the issue of the significant influence that existentialism has had in the applied fields of medicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, an impact that is often glossed over in introductory texts.
This book attempts to address these shortcomings. Although much attention is paid to the ‘big four,’ I try to cast a much larger net, drawing on a wide range of philosophical and literary figures as they become relevant to the issues. The first chapter, ‘Existentialism and Modernity,’ is devoted to the historical roots of the Western self as it emerges from the tension between Greek reason and Hebraic faith and how this tension is recast in modernity. To this end, Nietzsche's work is placed center-stage in framing the situation of nihilism and ‘the death of God’ that becomes crucial to twentieth-century existentialists. There is also a brief discussion of the broader cultural impact of existentialism outside of philosophy.
Chapter 2, ‘The Insider's Perspective,’ engages existentialism's critique of methodological detachment and objectivity by arguing that any account of human existence must begin from inside one's own finite and situated perspective. Here, different accounts of the insider's perspective are introduced, including Kierkegaard's conception of ‘subjective truth,’ Nietzsche's ‘perspectivism,’ and phenomenological accounts as they emerge in the work of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.
Chapter 3, ‘Being-in-the-World,’ addresses the ways in which existentialism undermines traditional philosophical dualisms by interpreting the human being not as an encapsulated thing or substance, but in terms of pre-reflective involvement in the world. Although the chapter draws largely on the seminal work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to articulate how we already embody an understanding of intra-worldly things, it also engages the work of figures like Frantz Fanon and Iris Marion Young to show how this tacit understanding can break down on the basis of racial and sexual difference.
The remainder of the book deals with the key issues of selfhood, freedom, authenticity, and ethics. Chapter 4, ‘Self and Others,’ describes the existentialist configuration of the self as a struggle between ‘facticity’ and ‘transcendence.’ With wide-ranging references to Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Ortega y Gasset, as well as to contemporary Anglophone philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt and Charles Taylor, the chapter illustrates how human beings are always making or creating themselves by interpreting and giving meaning to their factical situation. This chapter also addresses issues of embodiment and how the process of self-creation is often compromised by our calcified tendency to conform to the identities and roles of the public world.
Chapter 5 introduces freedom as the central idea of existentialism and identifies the ways in which existential freedom is distinct from more conventional views. Using Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground to frame the idea, the chapter discusses ‘radical’ or ‘absolute’ forms of freedom promoted by Sartre as well as the ‘situated’ forms of freedom developed by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Nietzsche's views on freedom. Although he breaks with other existentialists by criticizing the idea of free will and moral responsibility, Nietzsche can be viewed as offering his own version of situated freedom, one that is rooted in the polymorphous drives of the body but also reflects the goal of self-creation that is crucial to the existentialist program.
Chapter 6, ‘Authenticity,’ builds on the discussion of freedom by exploring what it means to be true to oneself. Here the significance of penetrating emotional experiences like anxiety, absurdity, and guilt is developed as having the power to pull us out of self-deception and bring us face-to-face with our own freedom and death. This discussion also explores how the existentialist account of emotions breaks decisively with the Romantic tradition. The second half of the chapter is framed around the core tension between being ethical (‘doing what is right’) and being authentic (‘being true to oneself’) and focuses on the influential accounts of authenticity offered by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.
Chapter 7, ‘Ethics,’ challenges the criticism that existentialism promotes a brand of ‘anything goes’ philosophy. The chapter begins by showing how existentialists like Sartre and Beauvoir support a notion of moral responsibility and of cultivating the value of freedom for others. The discussion then shifts to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who argue that there are moral demands that are already placed on us through our involvement in a shared historical situation (Heidegger) and through our intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty). The chapter concludes by showing how religious existentialists like Buber and Levinas challenge the modern attitudes of selfishness and individualism and develop a moral orientation rooted in the affective recognition of human vulnerability and suffering.
Chapter 8 engages existentialism's enormous contribution to psychiatry and psychotherapy. Drawing on the work of existential therapists such as R. D. Laing, Irvin Yalom, and Rollo May, the chapter explores the value of existentialism in psychiatry by showing how the patient's experience of psychopathology always needs to be situated and contextualized. On this view, the therapist does not regard the patient as an object of scientific investigation and does not necessarily interpret psychic suffering as a medical disease but as an existential given that has the power to disclose who we are as human beings. When anxiety overwhelms us by bringing us face-to-face with our own freedom and death, the therapist does not simply want to manage or control this feeling with medication or psychiatric techniques. The aim, rather, is to accept and integrate the unsettling experience into our lives. This acceptance can, in turn, free us from everyday forms of self-deception and open us up to deeper and more meaningful ways of living.
The final chapter, ‘Existentialism Today,’ addresses key aspects of existentialism that continue to shape the current intellectual landscape. The chapter begins with a discussion of existentialism's impact on recent political philosophy, focusing primarily on how it conceives of the experience of oppression and how this conception has profoundly influenced developments in feminist and postcolonial theory and critical philosophies of race. It then moves to existentialism's role in environmental philosophy. Drawing largely on the work of Heidegger, the discussion centers on the dangers of dualistic thinking when it comes to how we interpret nature and shows how the existentialist understanding of the self as being-in-the-world has helped environmental philosophers reconfigure our relationship to technology and to the earth itself. This discussion leads to an account of existentialism's impact on the emergence and legitimation of comparative philosophy in the West by illuminating affinities between Buddhist conceptions of ‘suffering’ (dukkha) and those found in the existentialist tradition. The discussion goes on to show how Buddhism addresses some potential shortcomings in existentialism by not romanticizing suffering but by offering specific practices to end it. The chapter concludes with an assessment of existentialism's legacy in contemporary medicine and its focus on the lived experience of illness rather the objective nature of disease. In questioning the viability of the scientific standpoint of detachment and objectivity, existentialism calls for healthcare professionals to not just ‘fix’ the diseased body but to help the patients give meaning to and make sense of their own experiences.