We will return to the role of the therapist and the problem of medicalization in the final chapter as we shift our discussion to existentialism's relevance today. As we will see, approaching the phenomena of health and illness from the perspective of one's own embodied and situated experience rather than from the perspective of scientific detachment has had a deep and wide-ranging impact on healthcare practitioners and has opened up exciting avenues of research in areas such as bioethics, narrative medicine, nursing, gerontology, and palliative care. This, along with other recent developments in feminist and post-colonial theory and critical philosophies of race, as well as in environmental philosophy and comparative thought, demonstrate that existentialism is not a moribund relic from mid-twentieth-century France. It is, rather, a way of thinking that is flourishing in some of the most important areas of contemporary philosophy and social science. It is to these recent developments that we can now turn our attention.
Binswanger, L. (1956). Existential analysis and psychotherapy. In F. Fromm-Reichmann and J. L. Moreno (eds.), Progress in psychotherapy (pp. 144–168). New York: Grune and Stratton.
Laing, R. D. (1960). The divided self: A study of sanity and madness. New York: Penguin Books.
May, R. (1958a). The origins and significance of the existential movement in psychology. In R. May, E. Angel, and H. F. Ellenberger (eds.), Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology (pp. 3–36). New York: Simon and Schuster.
Yalom, I. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
9: Existentialism Today
There is no denying that the Golden Age of existentialism has long passed. In the 1950s and 1960s, smoke-filled apartments, cafes, and jazz clubs in France and the United States were buzzing with late-night discussions of ‘la condition humaine,’ and an entire generation of young writers, musicians, and intellectuals could be seen carrying around tattered copies of works by Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Articles on the movement appeared regularly in mainstream magazines such as Life, Time, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, and the Atlantic Monthly, giving a popular voice to themes of ‘alienation,’ ‘absurdity,’ and ‘death.’ Indeed, the movement became so fetishized that the American fashion magazine Vogue would publish full spreads on Sartre and Beauvoir detailing both their radical ideas and the stylized look of the “French existentialist” (Cotkin 2003, 95). But if the cultural phenomenon has faded, does this mean the core ideas of existentialism are also passé? Was the French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard correct when he said, “We have thrown off that old existential garb. … Who cares about freedom, bad faith, and authenticity today?” (2001, 3; cited in Reynolds and Woodward 2011, 261). In this concluding chapter, I want to challenge this suggestion and argue that the legacy of existentialism is alive and well in current research in the humanities and social sciences.
We have already touched on existentialism's impact on contemporary trends in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (chapter 3), in dialogical and narrative conceptions of the self in recent Anglophone philosophy (chapter 4), and in current theories and practices in psychiatry and psychotherapy (chapter 8). But there are also new areas in political theory, feminist and post-colonial thought, and critical philosophies of race that are shaped by the ideas of existentialism. And many of the cutting-edge debates in environmental philosophy are informed by existentialism's critique of modern dualisms and the articulation of the self as relational and already bound up in the natural world. This relational ontology has also influenced key developments in comparative philosophy, revealing deep affinities between the existentialist conceptions of suffering, finitude, and selfhood and those found in the Eastern traditions. Finally, existentialism has made a profound and lasting impact on contemporary approaches to healthcare by reframing our interpretations of health and illness, engaging them from the perspective of lived experience rather than from the standpoint of scientific detachment and objectivity. The proceeding discussion will display existentialism's relevance by highlighting some of these contributions and how they have shaped the current intellectual landscape. We begin with an area for which existentialism has long been criticized, namely, politics.
Oppression and recognition
One of the most important critiques of existentialism comes from the Marxist tradition, one suggesting that the existentialist's narrow focus on the individual and subjective freedom in the face of meaninglessness and death tends to overlook concrete forms of social and political oppression that invariably inhibit the possibility for authentic self-creation. On this view, existentialism represents the perspective of a small, privileged, and affluent class of people who are often writing behind the secure walls of the academy and whose living conditions are not already fraught with daily struggles for food, healthcare, and shelter. For the vast majority of people, then, the existentialist call to heroically confront the possibility of death is eclipsed by more basic material needs for physical survival in order to avoid actual death. Indeed, although the ideas may have informed the slogans of the student and labor revolts in France in May 1968 and the activist politics of the New Left in England and the United States, existentialism's emphasis on the solitary individual, the extensive criticisms of the bureaucratic state and mass society, and the rejection of the possibility of moral absolutes and the viability of normative ethics suggests a deep ambivalence toward politics. But this criticism only skims the service.
It is true that existentialists tend to neglect traditional political questions concerning human ‘rights,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality.’ These values are largely dismissed as ‘metaphysical comforts’ or manifestations of bourgeois conformism that get in the way of the individual's confrontation with freedom and death. But the careful reader understands that there is a deeper aim for the existentialists, one focused on a radical reconfiguration of the way we interpret ‘the human,’ one that challenges the modern liberal tradition and the view of the self as a rational, masterful, and atomistic subject. And this reconfiguration has opened up a more nuanced sensitivity to the particularities of human suffering and aspects of oppression and exploitation that have been largely covered over by the abstract universal values of liberal democracies. Thus, even though many held political positions that were at times questionable and in Heidegger's case despicable, their philosophies nonetheless laid the groundwork for new ways to theorize oppression by dismantling the assumptions of the modern self.