Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views human existence as having a set of underlying themes and characteristics, such as anxiety, dread, freedom, awareness of death, and consciousness of existing, that are primary and that cannot be reduced to or explained by a natural-scientific approach or any approach that attempts to detach itself from or rise above these underlying themes. It conceives of Being itself as something that can only be understood through and in relation to these basic characteristics of human existence. For existentialism, human beings can be understood only from the inside, in terms of their lived and experienced reality and dilemmas, not from the outside, in terms of a biological, psychological, or other scientific theory of human nature. It emphasizes action, freedom, and decision as fundamental to human existence and is fundamentally opposed to the rationalist tradition and to positivism. That is, it argues against definitions of human beings either as primarily rational, knowing beings who relate to reality primarily as an object of knowledge or whose action can or ought to be regulated by rational principles, or as beings who can be defined in terms of their behavior as it looks to or is studied by others. More generally it rejects all of the Western rationalist definitions of Being in terms of a rational principle or essence or as the most general feature that all existing things share in common. Existentialism tends to view human beings as subjects in an indifferent, often ambiguous, and "absurd" universe in which meaning is not provided by either the natural order or God but rather can be created, however provisionally and unstably, by human beings' actions and interpretations.

Major thinkers and authors associated with the movement

Film directors

• Ingmar Bergman
• Eric Rohmer
• Alain Robbe-Grillet
• Richard Linklater
• David O. Russell
• Michelangelo Antonioni
• Woody Allen

Novelists and playwrights

Existentialist novelists were generally seen as a mid-1950s phenomenon that continued until the mid- to late 1970s. Most of the major writers were either French or from French African colonies. Small circles of other Europeans were seen as literary existential precursors by the existentialists, themselves, however, literary history increasingly has questioned the accuracy of this idealism for earlier models.

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There is overlapping between the American beat generation writers who lived in Paris, and felt it their spiritual home, and writers of road novels; as well as the delayed action of the French discovery of American film noir, in the 1950s, after a decade of Nazi-Fascist censorship, which, as Truffaut and others in the Cahiers du Cinema indicated, influenced novels and plays; to some extent, as well, the surrealist movement of Andre Breton and others, which questioned the established reality, made possible the isolation of non-academic novels protagonised by amoral anti-heroes.

Related Topics:
Beat generation - Road novels - Film noir - Truffaut - Cahiers du Cinema - Surrealist - Andre Breton

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The Belmondo school of existentialism, inspired by Genet, the criminal world, and French society's underclasses are seen now as a detective fiction sub-genre.

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The Excrement school of existentialism, a worldwide movement that uses excrement as metaphor to criticize life, society, and politics, came into vogue in the early 1990s in the avant-garde of Russian literature. It has retained cultural interest in the U.S. through such existential works as the Kafkaesque , which increasingly show that the universal themes of loneliness, alienation, and death in Excrement Literature are characteristic of the Existential movement.

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This is a general list of existentialist writers:

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• Edward Albee
• Georges Bataille
• Samuel Beckett
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Michel Butor
• Albert Camus
• Louis-Ferdinand Celine
• Marguerite Duras
• Ralph Ellison
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Jean Genet
• Andre Gide
• Hermann Hesse
• Henrik Ibsen
• Eugène Ionesco
• Franz Kafka
• Jack Kerouac
• Jerzy Kosinski
• Chuck Palahniuk
• Alain Robbe-Grillet
• Catherine Robbe-Grillet
• Natalie Sarraute
• Claude Simon
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Marquis de Sade (de Sade died too early to be part of the existentialist movement, but his writings have affected existentialism, and are of the existential literature tradition)
• Tom Stoppard
• Michael Szymczyk
• Miguel de Unamuno
• Richard Wright
• Robert Clark Young

Philosophers

• Simone de Beauvoir
• Nikolai Berdyaev
• Henri Bergson
• Martin Heidegger (Like Camus, Heidegger rejected the label 'existentialist'.)
• Karl Jaspers
• Hans Jonas
• Søren Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard died too soon to be a part of the existentialist movement, and would have rejected many tenets of Sartre's existentialism. Yet, he was of the first philosophers dealing with the problems of human existence in ways recognizable as forerunners of Sartrean existentialism.)
• Walter Kaufmann
• Ladislav Klíma
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Gabriel Marcel
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Friedrich Nietzsche (Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche died too soon to be part of the existentialist movement, and, in many ways differs from the existentialism we know. Yet, his work is precursor to many of the developments in later existentialist thought.)
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Lev Shestov
• Max Stirner
• Peter Wessel Zapffe

Psychologists

• Ludwig Binswanger
• Medard Boss
• Viktor Frankl
• R. D. Laing
• Rollo May
• Fritz Perls
• Irvin Yalom

Theologians

• Rudolf Bultmann
• John Macquarrie
• Paul Tillich