Which existentialist philosopher are you

Au contraire my friends. Existentialism is as complex as any philosophy. Actually we all have a little existentialist inside of us. Which one are? Are you a free thinker?

Naturally, there is a tension here. Like God he also can choose and act according to his will. Simultaneously, though, he is a finite being since he is restricted by his body, particular socioeconomic conditions and so forth.

This tension between the finite and infinite is the source of anxiety. But unlike a Hegelian analysis, Kierkegaard does not look for a way out from anxiety; on the contrary he stresses its positive role in the flourishing of the human.

The prioritization of anxiety as a fundamental trait of the human being is a typical existentialist move, eager to assert the positive role of emotions for human life. Perhaps the most famous work of Kierkegaard was Fear and Trembling , a short book which exhibits many of the issues raised by him throughout his career. Fear and Trembling retells the story of the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham.

God tells Abraham that in order to prove his faith he has to sacrifice his only son. Abraham obeys, but at the last moment God intervenes and saves Isaac. What is the moral of the story? The answer is naturally affirmative. Abraham should refuse God, and he should respect the ethical law.

On the contrary what Abraham tries to achieve is a personal relation with the author of the moral law. This author is neither a symbolic figure nor an abstract idea; he is someone with a name.

The Christian God then, the author of the moral law at his will suspends the law and demands his unlawful wish be obeyed. Jacques Derrida notes that the temptation is now for Abraham the ethical law itself Derrida : he must resist ethics, this is the mad logic of God.

The story naturally raises many problems. Is not such a subjectivist model of truth and religion plainly dangerous? What if someone was to support his acts of violence as a command of God? Kierkegaard also differentiates between the act of Abraham and the act of a tragic hero like Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia.

What is better to do? What would be more beneficial? Abraham stands away from all sorts of calculations, he stands alone, that is, free in front of the horror religiosus , the price and the reward of faith.

Remarkably, what in sounded like megalomania came some years later to be realized. Above all, Nietzsche has managed somehow to associate his name with the turmoil of a crisis.

For a while this crisis was linked to the events of WWII. More generally, the crisis refers to the prospect of a future lacking of any meaning. This is a common theme for all the existentialists to be sure. The prospect of millennia of nihilism the devaluation of the highest values inaugurates for Nietzsche the era in which the human itself, for the first time in its history, is called to give meaning both to its own existence and to the existence of the world.

This is an event of a cataclysmic magnitude, from now on there are neither guidelines to be followed, lighthouses to direct us, and no right answers but only experiments to be conducted with unknown results. Nietzsche believed that men in society are divided and ordered according to their willingness and capacity to participate in a life of spiritual and cultural transformation.

For Nietzsche the crisis of meaning is inextricably linked to the crisis of religious consciousness in the West. As he explains in The Genealogy of Morality , it is only after the cultivation of truth as a value by the priest that truth comes to question its own value and function.

What truth discovers is that at the ground of all truth lies an unquestionable faith in the value of truth. Christianity is destroyed when it is pushed to tell the truth about itself, when the illusions of the old ideals are revealed. But one has to be careful here. We have killed him — you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? The above sentences are very far from constituting a cheerful declaration: no one is happy here! Nietzsche is not naive and because he is not naive he is rather pessimistic. What the death of God really announces is the demise of the human as we know it.

One has to think of this break in the history of the human in Kantian terms. Similarly Nietzsche believes that the demise of the divine could be the opportunity for the emergence of a being which derives the meaning of its existence from within itself and not from some authority external to it.

If the meaning of the human derived from God then, with the universe empty, man cannot take the place of the absent God. This empty space can only be filled by something greater and fuller, which in the Nietzschean jargon means the greatest unity of contradictory forces. Nietzsche was by training a Klassische Philologe the rough equivalent Anglosaxon would be an expert in classics — the texts of the ancient Greek and Roman authors.

Perhaps because of his close acquaintance with the ancient writers, he became sensitive to a quite different understanding of philosophical thinking to that of his contemporaries. For the Greeks, philosophical questioning takes place within the perspective of a certain choice of life. Philosophical speculation is the result of a certain way of life and the attempted justification of this life.

The point is not always to speculate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge. Philosophical concepts are valuable insofar as they serve a flourishing life, not as academic exercises.

Under the new model of philosophy the old metaphysical and moral questions are to be replaced by new questions concerning history, genealogy, environmental conditions and so forth. What is Nietzsche telling us here? Two things: firstly that, following the tradition of Spinoza, the movement from transcendence to immanence passes through the rehabilitation of the body.

To say that, however, does not imply a simple-minded materialism. This archetypical body is indeed as yet unknown and we stand in ignorance of its abilities. The second thing that Nietzsche is telling us in the above passage is that this new immanent philosophy necessarily requires a new ethics. One has to be clear here because of the many misunderstandings of Nietzschean ethics. Nietzsche is primarily a philosopher of ethics but ethics here refers to the possible justification of a way of life, which way of life in turn justifies human existence on earth.

Morality, which Nietzsche rejects, refers to the obsessive need a need or an instinct can also be learned according to Nietzsche of the human to preserve its own species and to regard its species as higher than the other animals. In short morality is arrogant. A Nietzschean ethics is an ethics of modesty. It places the human back where it belongs, among the other animals. However to say that is not to equate the human with the animal. Unlike non-human animals men are products of history that is to say products of memory.

That is their burden and their responsibility. In the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche explains morality as a system aiming at the taming of the human animal. Heidegger exercised an unparalleled influence on modern thought. Without knowledge of his work recent developments in modern European philosophy Sartre, Gadamer, Arendt, Marcuse, Derrida, Foucault et al.

He remains notorious for his involvement with National Socialism in the s. Outside European philosophy, Heidegger is only occasionally taken seriously, and is sometimes actually ridiculed famously the Oxford philosopher A.

In , Jean Beaufret in a letter to Heidegger poses a number of questions concerning the link between humanism and the recent developments of existentialist philosophy in France.

There he repudiates any possible connection of his philosophy with the existentialism of Sartre. The answer here is that Heidegger can be classified as an existentialist thinker despite all his differences from Sartre. We have seen above that a principle concern of all existentialists was to affirm the priority of individual existence and to stress that human existence is to be investigated with methods other than those of the natural sciences.

His magnum opus Being and Time is an investigation into the meaning of Being as that manifests itself through the human being, Dasein. This question is what is the meaning of that Being which is not an entity like other beings, for example a chair, a car, a rock and yet through it entities have meaning at all? Investigating the question of the meaning of Being we discover that it arises only because it is made possible by the human being which poses the question.

Dasein has already a pre-conceptual understanding of Being because it is the place where Being manifests itself. Unlike the traditional understanding of the human as a hypokeimenon Aristotle — what through the filtering of Greek thought by the Romans becomes substantia, that which supports all entities and qualities as their base and their ground — Dasein refers to the way which human beings are.

This is why human beings locate a place which nevertheless remains unstable and unfixed. The virtual place that Dasein occupies is not empty. It is filled with beings which ontologically structure the very possibility of Dasein. Dasein exists as in-the-world. World is not something separate from Dasein; rather, Dasein cannot be understood outside the referential totality which constitutes it.

Heidegger repeats here a familiar existentialist pattern regarding the situatedness of experience. Sartre, by contrast, comes from the tradition of Descartes and to this tradition remains faithful. Sartre, following Descartes, thinks of the human as a substance producing or sustaining entities, Heidegger on the contrary thinks of the human as a passivity which accepts the call of Being.

For Kierkegaard anxiety defines the possibility of responsibility, the exodus of man from the innocence of Eden and his participation to history.

But the birthplace of anxiety is the experience of nothingness, the state in which every entity is experienced as withdrawn from its functionality. In anxiety we do not fear something in particular but we experience the terror of a vacuum in which is existence is thrown. Existentialist thinkers are interested in anxiety because anxiety individualizes one it is when I feel Angst more than everything that I come face to face with my own individual existence as distinct from all other entities around me.

Man is not a thinking thing de-associated from the world, as in Cartesian metaphysics, but a being which finds itself in various moods such as anxiety or boredom. Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger also believes that anxiety is born out of the terror of nothingness.

In this article we have discussed the ambiguous or at times downright critical attitude of many existentialists toward the uncritical and unreflecting masses of people who, in a wholly anti-Kantian and thus also anti-Enlightenment move, locate the meaning of their existence in an external authority. They thus give up their purported autonomy as rational beings.

For Heidegger, Dasein for the most part lives inauthentically in that Dasein is absorbed in a way of life produced by others, not by Dasein itself. Heidegger was a highly original thinker. His project was nothing less than the overcoming of Western metaphysics through the positing of the forgotten question of being. He stands in a critical relation to past philosophers but simultaneously he is heavily indebted to them, much more than he would like to admit.

This is not to question his originality, it is to recognize that thought is not an ex nihilo production; it comes as a response to things past, and aims towards what is made possible through that past. Questions: 18 Attempts: Last updated: Aug 2, Tamil Nadu. Andhra Pradesh. Questions: 8 Attempts: Last updated: Aug 13, Because it is not reality that philosophical theories display, but the philosophers themselves. He is suspicious of the central conceptions of philosophy; in them he senses dishonesty and lack of conscience.

Because, as Kant would say, there are no such things as things-in-themselves; a noumenal world does not exist and therefore the question remains unanswered. Featured Quizzes. Existentialism , Oxford: Blackwell. Crowell, S. Deutscher, P. Dreyfus, H. Haugeland, Fackenheim, E. Fell, J. Gabriel, M. Gordon, L. Gelven, M. Guignon, C. Hannay, A. Kierkegaard , London: Routledge. Hatab, L. Haugeland, J. Heidegger, M. Jaspers, K. Joseph, F. Woodward eds. Judaken, J. Bernasconi eds.

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The Gay Science , Walter Kaufmann trans. Ratcliffe, M. Reynolds, J. Understanding Existentialism , Stocksfield: Acumen. Ricoeur, P. Oneself as Another , Kathleen Blamey trans. Sartre, J. Being and Nothingness , Hazel Barnes trans. Baudelaire , Martin Turnell trans. Search for a Method , Hazel Barnes trans. Existentialism is a Humanism , Carol Macomber trans. Nausea , Lloyd Alexander trans. What is Literature? Schacht, R. Schrift, A. Simons, M. Spiegelberg, H. Taylor, C. Warnock, M.

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Faith and Understanding , Louise Pettibone Smith trans. Busch, T. Camus, A. The Stranger , Matthew Ward trans. Collins, J. Cotkin, G. Dostoevsky, F. Matlaw , New York: Norton. Earnshaw, S. Flynn, T. Gordon, H. Gordon, P. Grene, M. Reason and Existenz , William Earle trans.

Judt, T. Kant, I. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson trans.