‘Where has God gone?’ [the madman] cried, ‘I'll tell you where! We've killed him — you and I! We are all his murderers! … Aren't we wandering as if through an endless nothing? Isn't empty space breathing upon us? Hasn't it gotten colder? Isn't night and more night continuously coming upon us? Don't lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Don't we yet hear the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Don't we yet smell the divine rot? — For gods rot too! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!’ (1995, 125)
For Nietzsche, the traditional idols of Greek reason and Judeo-Christian faith have been destroyed by the new science, exposing them as fleeting human constructs, ‘metaphysical comforts’ that have been employed for millennia to conceal our underlying frailty. But Nietzsche makes it clear that the new science is just one more idol that we construct and cling to for security. Regardless of its success at rationally ordering and subduing the natural world, the answer to the question of what it means to be human cannot be provided by means of any scientific proof. “We have arranged a world for ourselves in which we can live,” says Nietzsche, “by postulating bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith, nobody could stand to live now! But this still does not mean that they have been proved. Life is no argument” (121, my emphasis).
Existentialism as a cultural mood
Nietzsche's announcement of God's death set the stage for much darker events in the first half of the twentieth century that appeared to confirm his prophecy: the horrors of the Great War and World War II, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After 1950, there was the threat of global annihilation during the Cold War, regional explosions of racial and colonial violence, and increasing environmental devastation. All this contributed to a cultural mood in Europe and America: a feeling that life was fundamentally absurd; that we are estranged from each other and not at home in the world; and that because there are no moral absolutes, we are left alone, rudderless and adrift in a “terrifying infinity,” with nothing and no one to tell us how to live our lives (Nietzsche 1995, 124). Although Nietzsche offered the clearest and most powerful articulation of this predicament and laid the intellectual groundwork for understanding the modern experience of nihilism, there were other important fin de siècle literary figures that played a crucial role in giving voice to the anguished confrontation with modernity. Although offering an exhaustive account of these figures is beyond the scope of this book, a number of key works are worth mentioning in order to get a sense of the chronology and the cultural and geographical scope of the movement.
As we will see in proceeding chapters, a number of Russian writers were uniquely equipped to address the upheavals of modernization because the process happened so quickly in Russia. In the span of a few decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, Russia rapidly transitioned from a feudal economy that was historically rooted in the close-knit indigenous practices of the Eastern Church to one that embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment and the secular values of egoism and scientific materialism that constituted this new worldview. Literary works that critically engaged these wrenching social transformations include Ivan Turgenev's (1818–1883) Fathers and Sons (1862), Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment (1860), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), and Leo Tolstoy's (1828–1910) The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886). The Russian essayist Lev Shertov (1866–1938) also played an important role by introducing and synthesizing the works of Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky with two important books, Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1900) and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy (1903). There were also important works published by Norwegian contemporaries, like Henrik Ibsen's (1828–1906) A Doll's House (1879) and Knud Hamsun's (1859–1952) Hunger (1890), that addressed similar themes of social fragmentation and alienation. By the first decade of the twentieth century, existentialism's confrontation with modernity was beginning to gain broader appeal. In addition to the writings of Kafka, whom we previously mentioned, the great German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1876–1926) published his hugely influential novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) that engaged issues of human finitude and meaninglessness. In 1913, the Spanish poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno published his masterwork The Tragic Sense of Life, addressing the concrete concerns of “the man who is born, suffers, and dies” (1954, 1). And, in 1914, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) would publish Mediations on Quixote that developed the idea of the human being as free and self-creating. Meanwhile, in Germany, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) reflected the Zeitgeist with a series of legendary lecture courses at Freiburg University in the early 1920s where he developed Wilhelm Dilthey's (1883–1911) notion of historical ‘thrownness’ and Kierkegaard's ideas of anxiety, freedom, and death, culminating in the first systemic analysis of human existence, his magnum opus Being and Time (1927). And Heidegger's contemporary in Germany, Karl Jaspers, would establish an analogous ‘philosophy of existence’ (or Existenzphilosophie) that focused on the importance of ‘limit situations’ like anxiety in the face of death that have the power to awaken us to the frailty and impermanence of our lives.
But the movement didn't reach its cultural zenith until it arrived in France in the 1930s. The five central figures, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Albert Camus (1913–1960), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), all played key roles in turning postwar Paris, especially the Latin Quarter around the Sorbonne, into the intellectual and artistic epicenter of existentialism in Europe. By the time Sartre gave his seminal 1945 lecture ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ to a packed house in Paris, existentialism had firmly established itself as one of history's most significant philosophical movements. What accelerated the cultural reception of existentialism in France is the way it was presented, not in the formal and dry prose of German professors like Heidegger and Jaspers, but in accessible literary works, short stories, novels, and plays that appealed to a much broader audience. Although Sartre certainly contributed a dense and technical treatise with his Being and Nothingness (1945), he was best known and most recognized for his literary works and plays such as Nausea (1938), The Wall (1939), and No Exit (1944) that engaged themes of freedom, responsibility, and the contingency of existence. Indeed, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 but refused to accept it. Similarly, Camus, another Nobel laureate for literature in 1957, wrote influential novels and essays such as The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), and The Rebel (1951) that reflected modern feelings of absurdity and alienation. And Beauvoir won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her novel The Mandarins (1954) that explored the predicament of nihilism through the prism of postwar Europe and the Cold War.
What made these literary works so culturally relevant is that they did not deal with abstract philosophical problems but were ‘committed’ or ‘engaged’ (engagée) not only to the struggles of the human situation but also to the concrete social and political realities of the day. These figures played active roles in the Resistance of the Nazi occupation and all wrote extensively on politics and contemporary social problems. And Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty together helped launch the influential journal of cultural criticism Les Temps Modernes in 1945 that became a crucial outlet for writers who resonated to the existentialist creed of a ‘littérature engagée’ such as American ex-patriot Richard Wright (1908–1960), Jean Genet (1910–1986), and Samuel Beckett (1906–1989). Beckett and Genet would go on to become principal players in ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ in the 1960s, referring to plays that expressed the Camusian themes of meaninglessness and the loss of religious faith. Meanwhile, in the United States, ‘The Lost Generation’ of writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) were capturing the experience of anguish and moral anomie in America after the Great War. And later the ‘Beat’ or ‘Hip’ writers of the 1950s, like Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), and William S. Burroughs (1914–1997), began echoing cultural sentiments in France, prompting Normal Mailer (1923–2007) to declare, “Hip is an American existentialism” (cited in Barnes 1967, 155). These American writers illuminated the feeling of being tired or ‘beaten down’ by postwar conformism and authoritarianism and articulated the need for self-creation through bold experimentation with drugs, sex, travel, and music, a revolt that would set the stage for a much wider counter-culture revolution in the 1960s.