I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness. … The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.

Blaise Pascal

Roots of the Western self

In order to situate the movement of existentialism within the context of recent European thought, we first have to go back to the earliest philosophical and religious currents that shaped the Western worldview. Understanding that it is impossible to compress the complexities of the last three millennia into a few pages, we can make the broad claim that the conflicting traditions of Hebraic faith on the one hand and Greek reason on the other have informed our sense of who we are. Both traditions offer the idea of the human being as unique to the extent that we are self-conscious and have ‘higher’ potentialities that allow us to surpass or transcend our finite earthly existence (e.g., Dreyfus 2009, 2012). In the tradition of Greek philosophy, transcendence was achieved through the standpoint of rational detachment, allowing the philosopher to rise above the temporal particularities of existence in order to gain knowledge of the universal, that is, to timeless and abstract forms or essences. In the Hebraic tradition, the experience of transcendence is understood not in terms of detached reason but in terms of an intense faith and trust in an incomprehensible God. This kind of faith can lead to confusion and despair because the Hebrew God is beyond rational understanding and is often cruel and violent. This is why, as William Barrett points out, there is a certain “uneasiness” in the biblical interpretation of the human condition that is not found in Greek philosophy (1958, 71). The picture of the human condition is one that is frail, finite, and filled with sin, and that stands naked and exposed before an unknowable God. In this sense, Job is the paradigmatic biblical figure. He confronts the calamitous trials that God has put before him, not with detached reason, but with the involved fullness of his whole being and all of the confusion, rage, and despair that comes with it. But through it all, his commitment to God remains passionate and unwavering, and it is by means of his faith that he is transformed. His anguish turns to awe in the face of God's infinite and incomprehensible majesty. In this way, we are introduced to the idea that the infinite and eternal can be revealed in passionate commitments that are finite and temporal. Thus, there is little discussion of heaven, the immortality of the soul, or the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible. Transcendence is found not in an otherworldly realm but in the concrete commitments of the whole person, body and soul, who inhabits this world. This idea of transcendence conflicts radically with the views of Plato and the tradition of Greek philosophy.

For Plato (427–347 bce), transcendence was not attained by the passionate faith of the whole person. It was achieved when reason, the ‘higher’ or divine part of the soul, rises above the ‘lower’ animal part, from the fleeting perceptions and passions of the body. This rational detachment makes theoretical knowledge possible, where ‘theory’ (theoria) is understood as a kind of disembodied seeing or contemplation. For Plato, the essential truths that philosophy discovers have the same form as the immutable truths of geometry and arithmetic. In this way, the philosopher becomes a disinterested spectator who transcends the contingent sensations of the body and comes to occupy a ‘God's-eye view’ of reality. This view allows him access to abstract ‘ideas’ (eidos), to the timeless and eternal essence of things. With Plato's influence, the cognizing mind becomes the absolute authority by discovering an unchanging ‘reality’ that lies behind the transitory ‘appearances’ of the temporal body.

We see, then, that the tradition of Greek reason conflicts with the Judaic worldview in two important ways. First, Greek philosophy provides a kind of intellectual protection or salvation from the experience of anguish and dread so vital to the Hebrew interpretation of faith. By focusing on knowledge of abstract ideas, the philosopher rises above the horrifying predicament that biblical figures like Job had to face. Second, Greek reason privileges a conception of transcendence that is attained through a disembodied theoretical standpoint. Indeed, for Plato, what distinguishes us as human beings is not our impassioned faith in an unknowable and fearsome God but the soul's ability to rationally detach from these emotional upheavals. It is only then that we arrive at a domain of truth that is immutable and timeless. The consequence of these conflicting versions of transcendence is a tension between two conceptions of selfhood in the West, one where the God of Abraham tells us to live one way, and the God of Greek reason tells us to live another (Dreyfus 2012, 97). The self, in the words of the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), emerges as a “conflict” or “contradiction,” pulled apart by an inner struggle between “the heart and the head,” between faith and reason (1954, 260). For figures like Unamuno, the tragedy of being human rests in part in the fact that this contradiction cannot be eradicated or overcome by separating the abstract truths of reason from the concrete commitments of faith. Such a separation is a denial of the wholeness of the human being and the anguished uncertainty and doubt at the core of our situation.

From its origins in Greece, Western philosophy has long perpetuated this separation by regarding the reasoning mind as the essential substance that gives us knowledge of eternal truths and, as a result, the mind itself is conceived as a substance that is eternal, providing an escape from the temporal vicissitudes of the body. As Plato says in the Phaedo: “If we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must escape from the body, and contemplate things by themselves with the soul itself” (66e). On this view, reason comes to be viewed as the supreme and defining characteristic of the human being, and this philosophical assumption remained relatively unscathed until the nineteenth century when existential philosophers and literary figures began to exhume embodiment, emotion, and contingency as being central to the human situation. Indeed, even with the historical rise and spread of Christianity through the Middle Ages, the vision of the human as the ‘animal rationale’ endured.

Although early church fathers like St. Paul (5 bce–67 ad) and Tertullian (160–220 ad) were still deeply committed to the principle of Hebraic faith, the cultural and political impact of Hellenistic philosophy compelled Christians to come up with ‘apologetics,’ rational defenses of their own religious positions and beliefs. Whereas for the Jews and the Greeks, faith and reason occupied two incompatible domains, Christians were confronted with both sources of transcendence. And, beginning with St. Augustine (354–430 ad) and continuing for over a thousand years, Christian theologians engaged this tension with the Augustinian expression ‘faith seeking [rational] understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum) by showing how the timeless, universal truths of reason work in relation to and in harmony with personal faith (Barrett 1958, 97).

Unfortunately, as the alleged father of existentialism Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) would make clear, the aim of bringing together the conflicting domains of faith and reason was absurd. How, for instance, can one make rational sense of God's command to Abraham that he kill his own son, or the senseless suffering of Job, or the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings, or the Incarnation of the God-man? “The problem,” as Kierkegaard writes, “is not to understand Christianity, but to understand that it cannot be understood” (1959, 146). Indeed, Kierkegaard can be viewed as a philosopher who attempts to resuscitate the Hebraic experience of vulnerability and dread and of transcendence as passionate commitment, by articulating the qualitative difference between the impersonal and objective truths of reason, on the one hand, and what Kierkegaard calls “the highest truth available for an existing individual,” on the other. These latter truths are subjective and are fundamentally uncertain and inaccessible to logic or reason. Subjective truths cannot be thought; they can only be felt with inward intensity in the course of living one's life.

We will explore how Kierkegaard engages the tension between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ truth in , but at this point we want to make clear that at least one thing remained consistent in the historical transition from Hellenism to Christendom. This was the belief that human beings belong to and are dependent upon a divine, value-filled cosmos that provided an enduring moral order, a ‘great chain of being’ that determined the proper function and place of things and how humans ought to act. On this view, the people of Greco-Christian Europe inhabited an enchanted world filled with deities and supernatural meaning. This conception of a divine cosmos provided ready-made answers to existential questions such as ‘Who am I?’ ‘How should I live?’ and ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ The ability to answer these questions became increasingly difficult beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the pre-modern orientation began to break down in the wake of a new Enlightenment worldview, and early modern philosophers such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), René Descartes (1596–1650), and Isaac Newton (1643–1727) began to lay the scientific groundwork that challenged the inherent divinity and meaningfulness of the world.

The emergence of the modern worldview

Although admittedly simplistic, it is generally agreed that there were three key events that contributed to the historical formation of the modern worldview (e.g., C. Taylor 1989, 2003; Guignon 2004a). The first and arguably most significant was the advent of modern science. From the perspective of the new science, the cosmos was no longer understood from a teleological view, as a moral order of absolute ends, but as a valueless aggregate of quantifiable objects colliding with one another. The cosmos becomes, in the words of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), “disenchanted,” a vast, all-encompassing machine that operates on the basis of fixed, law-like formulas. The vision of the scientist, on this account, is that of a disinterested observer who impartially collects data and formulates theories. Crucial to this method is the ability to abstract out the subjective qualities that we give to things – such as beauty, meaning, purpose, and value – and focus only on the objective qualities of things, that is, those qualities that can be measured or quantified such as mass, velocity, and location in a spatial-temporal coordinate system. With this view, anything in the natural world can now be objectified, examined from a perspective of cool detachment as an object to be manipulated. This is an explicitly humanistic view insofar as it revolves around the human being as the knowing ‘subject’ who masters and controls ‘objects.’ Weber summed up the aims of the new science by claiming, “There are [now] no more mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world becomes disenchanted” (1948, 139, my emphasis). Of course, on this view, human beings too can be regarded as quantifiable objects to be manipulated for specific purposes. And human behavior is no longer explained in terms of incalculable meanings or divine ends but in instrumental terms of causality, where every action and event is necessarily determined by a set of antecedent conditions.

Many philosophers of the time regarded the scientific revolution positively. Not only did it liberate human beings from the superstitions and oppressive dogmas of the church; it also provided techniques for increasing our mastery over the natural world. But some philosophers expressed reservation. One of the earliest and most powerful expressions was provided by the proto-existentialist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who, although a brilliant physicist and mathematician in his own right, experienced this new mechanistic and de-animated world not with optimism, but with dread. In his Pensées, he offered a powerful description of a world stripped of any trace of divinity or overarching meaning:

With Pascal we see the Janus face of modern science. On one hand, it frees human beings from the prejudices and superstitions of religion. On the other hand, this freedom means we are now abandoned and forlorn in a cold and meaningless universe.

A second important development in the formation of the modern worldview was the emergence of a new form of Christianity, Protestantism, that reconfigured the self by privileging the inner states of the soul. Although the emphasis on subjective inwardness is present in the Western tradition as early as Augustine's Confessions (397–398 ad), the cultural shift to religious individualism was officially inaugurated with Martin Luther's (1483–1546) famous protest against the Catholic Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517. Luther rejected the Catholic notion of salvation by means of sacraments or rituals, buying indulgences, or by doing ‘good works,’ and focused exclusively on the moral content of one's intentions – one's inner feelings, desires, and thoughts. The Protestant turn inward revealed a sharp distinction between the ‘inner’ self that was genuine and true and the transient and corruptible ‘outer’ self that is engaged in superficial worldly affairs. This shift also made it possible to disown one's actions in the world, seeing them as separate and distinct from one's real self because it is one's intentions, not one's actions, that are essential to who one is. In this way, Protestantism fortified the Christian attitude of contemptus mundi or ‘contempt for the world’ that contributed to a growing sense that we do not belong to it (Guignon 2004a, 30). And, like the new science, this contempt played a key role in the demystification of nature, regarding it as a domain of hostile objects to be mastered through self-discipline and an industrious work ethic.

The third major development in the formation of the modern worldview was a new picture of society, where human beings no longer understood themselves in terms of their social roles, relationships, and functions that were preordained by the divine order of things. Society, rather, came to be viewed as something artificial, an aggregate of disconnected individuals that was held together by instrumental social contracts and monetary exchanges. Public life begins to emerge as something unnatural, where one is compelled to adopt a number of fake personae or social ‘masks’ that are foreign to one's real self (Guignon 2004a, 33–36). As a result, an older way of being that was rooted in close-knit feudal societies, where one's identity was shaped by a deep sense of belonging to one's place and to one's role within a community, gave way to an increasingly rationalistic, impersonal, and alienating social order, the birth of the centralized state. This new version of society reduced human beings to calculable resources or commodities that, in turn, required the creation of a class of technical bureaucrats and administrators to manage and control these resources in factories, schools, hospitals, and office buildings. The nightmarish experience of having one's public life monitored and regulated by a cadre of anonymous bureaucrats heightened the modern experience of alienation and confusion and became a central theme in existentialist literature, notably in the writings of Franz Kafka (1883–1924). In his posthumously published novel The Castle (1926), for instance, the main character, known only as ‘K,’ arrives at a village in the winter and spends his time desperately trying to understand and communicate with the inaccessible bureaucrats of the castle who have control over all aspects of life in the village. The castle is a symbol of bureaucratic authority that, through endless paperwork, permits, and administrative procedures, stifles any expression of individual freedom and undermines the possibility for genuine human interaction, leaving ‘K’ feeling forlorn and isolated. The castle destroys what Kafka sees as the most basic of human needs, which, in the words of Max Brod, was “the need to be rooted in a home and calling, and to become a member of a community” (cited in May 1950, 7).

The impersonal and dehumanizing characteristics of the bureaucratic state were magnified by the Industrial Revolution with its wrenching pace, numbing repetitiveness, and alienating working conditions that became commonplace in the massive factories of Western Europe and the United States. A number of existentialists engaged the problem of alienation rising from the standardization and collectivization of the human being in the machine age. In his Notes from the Underground (1864), for instance, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) mockingly described this form of mechanized social engineering in terms of a ‘Crystal Palace,’ a reference to the huge glass and cast-iron building that housed the Great Exhibition in London and displayed the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs of the industrial age. For Dostoevsky, the Crystal Palace was not a sign of rational progress but a nightmare, symbolizing lifeless conformism, loneliness, excessive pride, and the mutilation of human existence. After personally vising the building in London in 1862, he wrote:

Given these wrenching social upheavals that characterized the modern age, it is no surprise that by the turn of the century, literary and philosophical references to inchoate feelings of anxiety, boredom, and suicide were becoming increasingly common. Indeed, in 1881, the American physician George M. Beard introduced the term ‘neurasthenia’ to the medical lexicon, referring to feelings of profound nervous exhaustion and anxiety that were becoming an epidemic in the industrialized cities of Germany, England, and the United States. According to Beard, “The chief and primary cause of this development and the very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization [itself]’ (1881, vi). With these conditions in place, the seeds of existentialism were sown.

No philosopher was more tuned into the upheavals of modernity than Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). His words vividly convey the frightening sense of abandonment and forlornness in the modern age, where moral absolutes can no longer serve as a source of security and meaning for our lives. This experience is powerfully captured in The Gay Science with his famous account of the ‘madman’ who descends into the marketplace to announce to the world that ‘God is dead!’:

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.

The French existentialists certainly set the tone for a broader literary movement in Europe and America. But the reach of the movement extended far beyond works of literature (see McBride 2012). In film, for instance, the French ‘New Wave’ was launched in 1960 with the release of Jean-Luc Godard's (b. 1930) film Breathless (Á bout de souffle). At the same time, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) was making movies like The Seventh Seal (1957) and Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) was making Eclipse (1962) and The Red Desert (1964), all of which explored themes of human finitude, anxiety, and the death of God, themes that would be taken up later and popularized by the American director Woody Allen (b. 1934) in darker films like Interiors (1978), Another Woman (1988), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). And in the world of art, the overlapping movements of cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism keyed into the cultural mood. At the turn of the century, Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's (1863–1944) The Scream captured the sense of existential dread; French Modernist Marcel Duchamp's (1887–1968) controversial painting Nude Descending Staircase, No. 2 (1912) revealed a newly fragmented, dehumanized, and mechanistic portrait of the human body; Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) provided witness to the horror and absurdity of technological warfare with Guernica (1937); the attenuated forms of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) reflected the modern experience of alienation and loneliness; and the American painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) cited the influence of existentialism on his convention-defying ‘drip style’ in his effort to express the importance of individual freedom and self-expression.

Outside of Europe and the United States, existentialism also had a significant impact in Latin America. Without question, it was the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset who had the most influential role in introducing existentialist thought to the subcontinent, especially in Argentina, where he periodically taught and attended conferences in Buenos Aires between 1916 and 1940 (Garrido 2010, 145). One of Gasset's influences in Argentina, Carlos Astrada (1894–1970), published two important early works in existentialism, El juego existencial in 1933 and Idealismo fenomenológico y metafisica existencial in 1936. Gasset's Spanish compatriot José Gaos (1900–1969) brought existentialism to Mexico after becoming a citizen in 1941. In addition to the works of Kierkegaard, Gaos provided the definitive Spanish translation of Heidegger's Being and Time in 1951, more than ten years before the work was officially translated into English or French. And in 1939, Peruvian philosopher Wagner de Reyna (1915–2006), who was a student of Heidegger at Freiburg in the 1920s, published La ontología fundamental de Heidegger, one of the first comprehensive studies on the German philosopher (Oliveira 2010). These early pioneers, and many others, drew on the work of existentialists to engage concerns that were unique to the Latin American situation including critiques of totalitarianism, the problem of freedom and self-identity under colonialism, and the possibilities for revolution. And they set the stage for broad institutional developments across Latin America in the form of influential philosophical organizations and research groups devoted to existentialism and phenomenology.

Beyond philosophy, literature, and the arts, existentialism also left its mark on the thought of the most influential theologians of the time. Although already present in the nineteenth-century writings of figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, the religious or theistic expression of existentialism had a powerful incarnation in the twentieth century, especially in Protestant Germany, where Karl Barth (1886–1968), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) engaged existential questions regarding the relationship between faith and freedom, the meaning of anxiety in the modern age, and the terrifying incomprehensibility of God. The Jewish philosophers Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) also made important contributions. Buber envisioned the possibility of authentic dialogue between human beings by synthesizing aspects of the Hasidic mystical tradition with existentialism. He was well known for critiquing the alienating ‘I–It’ relations of modernity and offered what he called the ‘I–Thou’ relation as an alternative, one that is open and attentive to the intrinsic vulnerability of the other. And Levinas forwarded a notion of ‘ethics as first philosophy’ that begins from the concrete experience of exposure and openness to ‘the face’ of the other, an experience of vulnerability and suffering that undercuts our ordinary egoistic and objectifying tendencies. Catholic existentialists such as Marcel echoed this call for non-objectifying human relations through acts of charity and the experience of ‘communion’ with others. And from the Eastern Church, figures like Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) used Christianity to attack the increasingly rational and mechanistic structure of modern society for the sake of human freedom and self-expression.

Finally, existentialism made a deep and lasting impression on psychiatry and the developing practice of psychotherapy by challenging the reductive and mechanistic approach of Freudian analysis and biochemical accounts of psychopathology. Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Jaspers all offered critiques of the psychiatric assumption that the human being could be treated as an ‘object’ of scientific investigation. Instead, they argued that the human being could only be understood within a particular social context that provides a background sense of what matters in life. In their view, it is only by being bound up in the world that we can make sense of who we are as persons, and when our sense of belongingness or integration with the world breaks down, psychiatric conditions begin to emerge. The only way for a psychiatrist to properly understand a patient, then, is to try to access, however incompletely, their way of ‘being-in-the-world.’ As Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927–1989) explains: “One has to be able to orientate as a person in the other's scheme of things rather than only to see the other as an object in one's own world” (1960, 26). The existentialist view inspired a diverse group of prominent European and American psychiatrists, including Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1996), Medard Boss (1903–1990), Rollo May (1909–1994), Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), and Irvin Yalom (b. 1931). And it allowed clinicians to reenvision the meaning of psychic suffering. Rather than regarding anxiety and depression in terms of medical pathologies, existential therapists interpreted them as ‘givens,’ as constitutive of the human situation. The aim of therapy, in their view, is not to blunt these feelings through pharmacological intervention or to overcome them by gaining insight into their Oedipal sources, but to have the patient accept and integrate them into his or her life as disclosive of their essential frailty, vulnerability, and impermanence. By facing and owning up to their predicament in this way, the patient can be freed from everyday forms of self-deception and live a deeper and more fulfilling life.

Before concluding this discussion, it is important to say a few words about the institutional reception of existentialism in the United States. Needless to say, American philosophers did not enthusiastically embrace the movement. At worst, it was regarded as a dangerous incarnation of ‘irrationalism’ or ‘nihilism’ that glorified individual freedom as the ultimate value without any recognition of our moral obligation to others. In terms of methodology, it was criticized for its impenetrable rhetoric and for failing to meet the standards of argumentative rigor and conceptual clarity that typified the methods of so-called ‘analytic philosophy’ and the dominant trends of empiricist, logical positivist, and ordinary language philosophy. Given this hostile reception, existentialism was still able to make gradual inroads into the philosophical mainstream. The academic initiation officially began in the 1930s when Jewish émigré scholars who had studied with Heidegger at Freiburg fled to the United States seeking asylum from Nazism. Among these figures, dubbed ‘Heidegger's Children,’ were Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Hans Jonas (1903–1993), and Karl Löwith (1897–1973). With the exception of Marcuse, all of them found a home at one time at the University in Exile, founded in 1933 as a graduate division of the New School for Social Research in New York City (Wolin 2001). Outside of the small leftist enclave of the New School and a handful of Catholic universities, existentialism began to play a more prominent role in academe in the 1950s when John Wild (1902–1972), at the time a professor at Harvard, decided to create a new professional society for interested students and colleagues that focused on recent trends in French and German philosophy. Wild moved from Harvard to become chair of the philosophy department at Northwestern University in 1961, and his plan came to fruition the following year when the university hosted the inaugural meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (or SPEP), now the second largest philosophical society in the United States.

In addition to the institutional development of SPEP and the founding of prominent journals like Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1939 and Man and World (now Continental Philosophy Review) in 1968, a number of important works were published that introduced the movement and its major figures to an American audience. In 1949, Helmut Kuhn (1899–1991) published Encounter with Nothingness: An Essay on Existentialism offering one of the first comprehensive overviews of existentialist thinkers. Nietzsche scholar and translator Walter Kauffman (1921–1980) edited the anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre in 1956 that brought together primary texts from major figures, many of which had never been translated before. And in 1958, William Barrett (1913–1992) published Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy that has long been regarded as the definitive introduction to existentialism and widely praised for its historical scope, accessibility, and clarity. Meanwhile, a number of prominent American philosophers brought existentialist thought into conversation with core issues in Anglophone philosophy. Arthur Danto's (b. 1924) Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965) explored the relevance of Nietzsche's thought in relation to traditional problems in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. In 1972, Hubert Dreyfus (b. 1929), a former student of Wild's at Harvard, drew on the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to offer a pioneering critique of representational theories of knowledge and the scientific pretensions of Artificial Intelligence in his book What Computers Can't Do. (Dreyfus went on to train a whole generation of influential Heidegger scholars over a forty-year teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley.) And in his groundbreaking 1979 work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty (1931–2007) appropriated the insights of existentialist thought to develop his own conception of ‘edifying philosophy’ to critically dismantle a number of assumptions that were fundamental to mainstream philosophy of mind and epistemology.

Although it was originally ghettoized, these historical developments all contributed to existentialism's legitimation and eventual acceptance as an important area of specialization in American philosophy. Today, it is strongly represented at the annual meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA) with smaller professional research groups (or ‘Circles’) devoted to every major figure; there is scholarship published in prominent journals and book series devoted solely to existentialist thought at leading university presses; and it remains a steady presence in philosophy curricula at research and teaching institutions across the country. To be sure, traditional methodologies that emphasize logical rigor and argumentative clarity still dominate in the United States, but American philosophers have increasingly grown to appreciate William Barrett's pointed observation that “so far as he logicizes, man tends to forget existence. It happens, however, that he must first exist in order to logicize” (1958, 305).

From these reflections, we can begin to appreciate the enormous cultural impact that existentialism has had on the contemporary Western world in diverse areas of philosophy, literature, art, theology, and medicine. For this reason, it cannot be dismissed as a moribund, decade-long episode in postwar France. Rather, it represents a centuries-long engagement with the most fundamental of human questions: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How should I live?’ These questions reverberate more powerfully than ever today as we struggle to find meaning and purpose in a secular world that is increasingly alienating, disjointed, and insecure. In order to address these questions, we have to first turn to the methodological issue of how to gain access to human existence. On the existentialist view, we cannot take the traditional standpoint of theoretical detachment and objectivity because, insofar as we exist, we are already caught up in the concrete situation that we find ourselves in. This means that existence can be accessed only from ‘inside,’ that is, from within one's own situated, affective, and embodied point of view. In , we turn our attention to the various incarnations of what can be called the ‘insider's perspective’ as they are expressed in the works of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as in the phenomenological projects of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre.

Suggested reading

Barrett, W. (1958). Irrational man: A study in existential philosophy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Cotkin, G. (2003). Existential America. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Dreyfus, H. (2009). The roots of existentialism. In H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.), A companion to phenomenology and existentialism (pp. 137–161). Oxford: Blackwell.

McBride, W. (2012). Existentialism as a cultural movement. In S. Crowell (ed.), The Cambridge companion to existentialism (pp. 50–69). New York: Cambridge University Press.