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Text: © 2008 David Cogswell
Illustrations: © 2008 Joe Lee
Cover Art: © 2008 Joe Lee
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A For Beginners® Documentary Comic Book
Copyright © 2000
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eISBN: 978-1-939994-07-3
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v3.1
Table of Contents
Existentialism: What’s in a Name?
Defining Terms
The Dawning of a New Awareness
From the Ruins of Religion
Philosophy Matters
In the Beginning was (Not) the Word
The Origins of Existentialism
What Unites Them
Hegel: The Jumping-Off Point
Schopenhauer: The First Dissenter
Dostoyevsky: The Visionary
Kierkegaard: The Source
Nietzsche: The Soul
Kafka: Painter of the Absurd
Rilke: Existential Poet
Jaspers: The Formulater
Phenomenology: Dilthey and Husserl
Heidegger: A New Language
Sartre: The Quintessential Existentialist
Camus: Existential Humanist
Beauvoir: Existential Feminism
Marcel: Existential Christian
Merleau Ponty: Brother in Arms
Ortega Y Gassett: Existential Politician
Existential Theater
Existential Film
Existential Music
Existential Art
Existential Psychotherapy
Existential America
Existential Politics
Into the Sunset
Selected Bibliography
About the Author and Illustrator
People say that what we’re all seeking is the
meaning of life... I think that what we’re really
seeking is the experience of being alive.
–Rudyard Kipling
No one ever owned existentialism. It has always meant different things to different people. It was never a single doctrine that was laid down definitively by one person or group. Each piece of writing about it is different, each bears an individual stamp. There was no single voice of authority, so its definition has always had blurry edges. It grew up in the public domain, as a dawning of a new way of thinking about life that emerged at a particular moment in history. It could be seen as a historical necessity or inevitability, an effort to adapt to a new confluence of cultural and historical forces.
The list of so-called existentialists is very diverse, ranging from devout Catholics, Protestants, and Jews to agnostics and staunch atheists, and includes a variety of nationalities, temperaments and personal beliefs. Most of those referred to today as existentialists were not even alive when the word was created. And most of those who were alive objected to being categorized that way.
They tended to be mavericks, outsiders of the philosophical academy who wrote in untraditional forms, like fiction, plays or essays as well as more traditional philosophical treatises. Yet as diverse as they are, there are certain affinities among them that justify grouping them together as purveyors of an existentialist view. Their greatest similarity may be their own strong devotion to individualism, and their emphasis of the individual in discussing philosophical subjects.
It may be easier to understand existentialism by thinking of it not as a coherent system of philosophy, but as a widespread rebellion against traditional philosophy, which many felt was out of touch with real life. Existential philosophy left a rich vein of literature, colored by a new world view, representing a new historical phase in the intellectual and moral evolution of Western civilization.
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines existentialism as “a chiefly 20th century philosophy that is centered upon the analysis of existence specifically of individual human beings, that regards human existence as not exhaustively describable or understandable in idealistic or scientific terms, and that stresses the freedom and responsibility of the individual, the irreducible uniqueness of an ethical or religious situation, and usually the isolation and subjective experiences (as of anxiety, guilt, dread, anguish) of an individual therein.”
Webster defines the root word existential as “1. of, relating to, or affirming existence. 2. a. grounded in existence or the experience of existence, having being in time and space.” And its third meaning is its specific use as it evolved in relation to the context of existential philosophy: “concerned with or involving an individual as radically free and responsible.”
The emergence of existential philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could be seen as an attempt to stretch traditional ways of thinking to accommodate emerging discoveries that were irreversibly expanding man’s view of the universe.
The discoveries and advances of science, technology and exploration were drastically expanding and changing the way people perceived and understood the world. The discovery of dinosaurs, as just one example, introduced realities that could not be accommodated by the traditional religious view of the universe and its origin. Dinosaurs were not in the Book of Genesis. 
The Biblical view of the world created in six days was shattered when people were suddenly struck with the fact that the earth had a long history and had evolved over inconceivable stretches of time. A flood of similarly earthshattering new realities presented themselves to Western Civilization forcing prevailing systems of thinking to stretch to accommodate them.
A greater understanding of time and duration brought attention to the failure of traditional logic and rationality to accommodate the passage of time. The logic that had prevailed in the western world, that of Plato and Descartes, was exercised as if from a point of view outside of place and time. 
Objectivity, which requires mentally placing oneself outside of that which is being discussed, was seen as the most valid and reliable way of thinking. Existential philosophy grew from the feeling that a new, more agile kind of reasoning was needed, one that could accommodate the movement of time, the expanding universe and the increasing power in the hands of mankind.
With the increase in scientific knowledge came an increased power over the material world. Though scientific knowledge could create the power, it could not create solutions for all of the problems brought on by the exercise of that power. Human systems, which had become increasingly powerful and efficient were powerless to avert the catastrophic destruction and carnage of the World Wars, for example. Science was a method, a very powerful one, for processing information and gathering reliable knowledge. But while science increasingly supplanted religion as the dominant belief system, science had no ethical component.
In a world where many had ceased to believe in God, humanity needed new ways to decide what is ethical, what is permissible. Science, with its cold objectivity, lacked the human dimension, so it failed as an all-encompassing belief system that could guide human judgment and action.
From the ruins of religionExistentialism grew up within the void left by the decline of religion. It’s difficult in the twenty-first century to grasp how much religion ruled the lives of people in Medieval Europe. As William Barrett explains in his book Rational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, religion was for Medieval man “not so much a theological system as a solid psychological matrix surrounding the individual’s life from birth to death, sanctifying and enclosing all its ordinary and extraordinary occasions in sacrament and ritual. The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas and rites which had the psychological validity of immediate experience, and within which hitherto the whole psychic life of Western man had been safely contained. In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendental realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity.”
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment uprooted traditional religious beliefs, and replaced them with science, rationalism and materialism. Logical positivism, a philosophy based on science as the ultimate way of knowing, became elevated as religion shrank in influence. The scientific view was built on several principles.
Descartes, the French philosopher largely responsible for establishing the scientific method, recognized its limited applicability. A profoundly religious man, Descartes advocated separating areas in which the scientific method is appropriate from areas of human activity in which it is not adequate. As science became enthroned as the new religion, many subjective or metaphysical concerns that fell outside of its realm by definition, were simply cast aside as unreal or irrelevant.
Though science was bringing a flood of knowledge and power to humanity, existential thinkers said that science and strictly rational thinking did not address the whole of life, only the measurable part. Many human needs and concerns, such as morals and ethics, love and devotion, and mortality were not addressed by science. If such a thing as love were to be recognized by science, it would only be to measure or analyze it from the point of view of an outside observer. Unlike religion, which had infused each part of life with ritual and meaning, science proved inadequate as an overarching system of existence for human beings. It left many issues unaddressed. And that which fell outside the reach of science, that which could not be scientifically proven, was considered to not exist.
The tendency to separate the intellect and place it above the rest of life had a long history, going back to the beginning of Western philosophy when Plato set the intellect apart from the rest of life and made it the ruler. While philosophers in the academies pondered and debated increasingly abstract questions such as whether the world exists, or whether the person thinking exists, they became less relevant to people outside of the academy.
In the early nineteenth century, Hegel’s idealism took the tendency to separate the intellect from the rest of life to its extreme. He created an elaborate system that supposedly explained everything in terms of the evolution of what he called Mind or Spirit and painted a picture of a universe in which he found a rational, secular replacement for religion at the center of human life.
Viewing the world from such an abstract point of view could lead to catastrophes, in which individual people fall through the cracks of a grand theory. The reaction to this idealistic trend of academic philosophy became known as existential philosophy, and in the 1940s that tradition was elevated to an “ism”: existentialism.
Philosophy mattersExistential philosophers wanted to pull philosophy down from the ivory towers of the academy and bring it to the real life of people in the streets. Defined as the inquiry into ways of thinking and understanding the world, philosophy does make a difference in how people actually live. Philosophy tries to understand the basic logic that underlies the way people think.
For example, some who believe in the Darwinian theory of natural selection, what Samuel Butler called “survival of the fittest,” believe that it is wrong to help those in need because helping the weak survive will weaken the species in the evolutionary process. “Social Darwinism” referred to a political belief system that justified policies of individual self interest based on Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
On the other hand, if one believes the unit of survival in the evolutionary process is the community, one may believe that society is best served by policies through which members of the community work together and help each other. If one has studied ecology, one may believe their own survival is dependant on the survival of many other species of plants and animals, so that care of the environment is a part of their own strategy for survival. The way people think does affect the way people will live and conduct their affairs in a given society.
If one believes that sin will lead to burning in Hell for eternity, he or she may think differently about morals and ethics than one who believes there is no such thing as Hell, or even God. Philosophy does make a material difference in people’s lives. Even ideas we are not conscious of may underlie our behavior and affect the way society works.
Existentialists believed that western philosophy, the way people thought, had gotten off track, civilization had lost its way and was leading humanity toward dangerous confrontations with new realities. The massive human catastrophes of the World Wars seemed to dampen the great confidence of the Western world in its science and its powers and to affirm the fear that man had unleashed forces beyond his control.
Existential philosophers challenged some of the fundamental beliefs that had prevailed in western civilization and looked for new ways of thinking that would better accommodate what happens in real life.
The origin of the word existentialism is itself controversial. It surfaced in the popular culture of France in the euphoric first days of liberation after World War II and four grim years of occupation under the iron heel of the Nazis. The angular, exotic word, associated with the daring, colorful and sexy café culture of postwar France, captured the imagination of the world and spread rapidly, even though few had a clear idea what it meant.
Though the word is often attributed to Jean Paul Sartre, he clearly did not coin the term. When a reporter asked him in August 1945 if he was an existentialist he said, “I don’t know what that means. Mine is a philosophy of being.” But two months later, in October of that year, he changed his tune and embraced the word in a lecture called “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in which he laid out the philosophy he had just begun to call existentialism. Sartre became the person most identified with existentialism.
Some say Gabriel Marcel coined the word in 1940 to refer to the work of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In 1960 Beauvoir said, “During a discussion organized during the summer [of 1945] ... Sartre had refused to allow Gabriel Marcel to apply this adjective to him ... I shared his irritation. I had written my novel [The Blood of Others] before I had even encountered the term existentialism; my inspiration came from my own experience, not from a system. But our protests were in vain. In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it for our own purposes.”
According to Karl Jaspers, in his three-volume Philosophy, “[1] thought I was inventing a word, ‘existentialism,’ to describe a possible decay of self-elucidation. After the war I was surprised to see this realized in France. I did not pursue or anticipate the road of this later existentialism.”
Some say it was the French writer Louis Lavelle who coined the term. Some have said the word emerged from the public domain, and it’s quite likely more than one person hit upon the idea of adding of an “ism” to the word “existential,” to refer to the “existential philosophy” that was based on Soren Kierkegaard’s use the word.
In any case, once existentialism had been named and associated with a group of writers identified with the French underground resistance, including Sartre, Albert Camus, de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau Ponty and Marcel himself, the word was then applied retroactively to the predecessors of those writers. The tradition was extended backward in time to include Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers earlier in the twentieth century, and back to the early nineteenth century to Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard.
Also identified as existentialists were German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian fiction writer Franz Kafka, Spanish writer and political activist José Ortega y Gasset, as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Eugene Gendlin, playwrights Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett and many more. The American Beat Generation writers, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, have also been identified with the existentialists.
The label was applied to more and more writers and artists until Sartre himself, the man most identified with existentialism, eventually said it had been so broadly applied that “it no longer means anything anymore.”
According to Tillich, the broad extension of the word was appropriate because the ideas underlying existentialism became increasingly relevant as the world evolved. “In contrast to the situation in the last three years after the second World War,” he wrote, “when most people identified existentialism with Sartre, it is now common knowledge in this country that existentialism in the western intellectual history starts with Pascal in the seventeenth century, has an underground history in the eighteenth century, a revolutionary history in the nineteenth century and an astonishing victory in the twentieth century. Existentialism has become the style of our period in all realms of life.”
The Origins of ExistentialismMost scholars trace existential philosophy back to Soren Kierkegaard, a troubled Danish writer in the early nineteenth century. Kierkegaard rebelled against the prevailing church of his time, which he found to have lost the spirit of Christianity and become just a secular institution with no soul, and also against the grand system idealistic philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, considered at that time by the academic establishment to be the epitome of philosophical thinking. Kierkegaard ridiculed Hegel’s system, proclaiming that “an existential system is impossible” and declaring that no system of thought could ever adequately explain or predict life.
The other most-cited originator of existentialism was a German contemporary of Kierkegaard, a philologist-turned-philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche. Though he developed his thinking independently of Kierkegaard, Nietzche’s thinking was remarkably similar in spirit to that of Kierkegaard even though Nietzsche was as passionate an atheist as Kierkegaard was a Christian. Both thought prevailing religious and philosophical institutions were inadequate to the spiritual needs of the new world.
Karl Jaspers, one of the main articulators of existential philosophy in the twentieth century, wrote in his book Man in the Modern Age, that the rise of existential philosophy represents the struggle by modern man to lead an authentic and genuine life in spite of the modern drift toward mass, standardized society. Jaspers sees the flowering of existentialism as coming forth from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche independently.
Jaspers could be credited with bringing together the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche for the twentieth century and outlining the unified ground of the existential philosophers in his book Existenzphilosophie. But he objected to the label “existentialism” when it arose later in France because it seemed to denote a school of thought, a doctrine, which he saw as a limitation.
JASPERS: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche appear as the expression of destinies, destinies which nobody noticed then, with the exception of some ephemeral and immediately forgotten presentiments, but which they themselves already comprehended...
This comparison is all the more important since there could have been no influence of one upon the other, and because their very differences make their common features so much more impressive. Their affinity is so compelling, from the whole course of their lives down to the individual details of their thought, that their nature seems to have been elicited by the necessities of the spiritual situation of their times. With them a shock occurred to Western philosophizing whose final meaning can not yet be estimated.
Common to both of them is a type of thought and humanity which was indissolubly connected with a moment of this epoch, and so understood by them... Their thinking created a good atmosphere. They passed beyond all of the limits then regarded as obvious. It is as if they no longer shrank back from anything in thought. Everything permanent was as if consumed in a dizzying suction...
In a magnificent way, penetrating a whole life with the earnestness of philosophizing, they brought forth not some doctrines, not any basic position, not some picture of the world, but rather a new total intellectual attitude for men...
The fact that one was a passionate Christian and the other a passionate atheist was not as important to Jaspers as the fact that they both rooted their thinking not in the abstract realms of the academy, but in their existenz.
Walter Kauffman, in his 1956 book Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, chose as his starting point the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Greek Orthodox Christian whose novels produced some of the most eloquent statements of existential philosophy.
Sartre himself traced the origin of existentialism to Dostoyevsky’s statement, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be permissible.” Some scholars have said the first piece of existentialist literature was the poem “Pensees,” written by Blaise Pascal, who lived 1623-1662. In his 1959 book From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Kauffman identified precursors of existentialism going back to Shakespeare in the 1500s.
Nietzsche, Heidegger and Martin Buber, all major contributors to existential thinking, turned all the way back to ancient Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus to rediscover what they felt had been lost in Greek philosophy with Plato.
And yet, as much diversity as the existential tradition reflects, existentialism represents a common thread in history, a broad-based rebellion against traditional philosophy, especially the idealist and rationalist philosophy epitomized by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the increasing abstraction of philosophy that had over the centuries taken it farther and farther from the concerns of real people.
What Unites ThemAs diverse as the existentialist writers were, there are a number of basic principles they share in common.
In Existentialism For Beginners, we’ll pour over the rich literature, history and ideas behind existentialism, how it was born in the nineteenth century, grew up in the early twentieth century and became all the rage in the post World War II years, how it infused the culture at large and why it is still significant in the twenty-first century.