What is Existentialism?

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre attended the ceremony of the 6th Anniversary of the Founding of Communist China in Beijing on 1 October 1955 in Tiananmen square. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

This question is still the subject of debate amongst philosophers today. On the one hand, you get very broad definitions of the category, which include thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily – people like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Heidegger, as well as French existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir. However, some philosophers claim that the category is so broad that it ceases to pick out any meaningful similarities between the thinkers, because, although they share similar preoccupations, they wrote from very different contexts and came to radically different conclusions.

On the other hand, you get this narrow approach to defining Existentialism, which has appeared in the work of Jonathan Webber more recently. He says that we need to understand Existentialism as a theory of value, which says that freedom is what is valuable, and as an ethical system built on that – that we must treat other people in a way that acknowledges the freedom of each person and the structure of human existence. That view is something that emerged with Sartre and Beauvoir in the 1940s.

A response to Nihilism?

My own view is that Sartre and Beauvoir were reinterpreting long-standing traditions that predate them, and they were engaging with philosophers who are now little known. For example, in the 1930s, there was a school of thought called Personalism, one of the leading figures of which was Emmanuel Mounier. He also said that freedom was a central component of human life, and Sartre and Beauvoir contributed to this discussion in French philosophy and atheistic ethics.

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At the time, in the interwar period, France was receiving the philosophy of Nietzsche, and many atheist thinkers were beginning to ask questions about the meaning of life and the possibility of ethics in a world without God. What Sartre and Beauvoir did, in a very creative and distinctive way, was to take these questions and to try to give an answer to the nihilists who thought that you couldn’t arrive at any values or meaning for human life. It was a particularly profound point to be making in the context of the Second World War.

Expressing their ideas through fiction

Existentialism, if you take it as this theory about freedom and ethics, emerges in the mid-1940s. One of the ways that Sartre and Beauvoir expressed these ideas was through fiction. They wrote plays and novels because they thought that the truth couldn’t just be expressed in the form of philosophical treatises, especially where ethical matters were concerned. It’s important to show the unfolding of ethical lives, or – especially – unethical lives in people’s dialogues with one another.

They used different literary forms, including theatre and novels, to express their philosophy in more imaginatively engaging ways. Part of the reason that they came to such prominence is because they weren’t just writing 1,000-page books on phenomenological ontology. Being and Nothingness was literally a one-kilogram book. There’s a rumour that butchers were buying the book during the war to use when they were weighing up meat. So, it’s a large, jargon-dense and difficult book. That by itself wasn’t going to make Existentialism an international phenomenon, but applying the philosophy to these questions about human life is something that they did in fiction to great effect – and that really did launch them both into the international literary scene.

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Sartre’s Huis Clos

One of the most famous of Sartre’s plays, Huis Clos or No Exit, is a play in which there are three characters who have just arrived in the afterlife. Each of the three characters is wrestling with the legacy that they left behind, and which they no longer have any control over. Sartre cites André Malraux, as he does in Being and Nothingness, and the idea that death transforms life into destiny: once you’re dead, you no longer have the power to act, to change the way you are perceived by others.

In the play, you also get the famous Sartrean line “Hell is other people”, and the standard reading of the play is the idea that humans so dislike the way that other people perceive them, that they experience existence – social existence – as hell. But there are other possible readings of the play, according to which two of the characters are in bad faith, Garcin and Estelle, and Inèz, the third character, is trying to be authentic, to recognise that her life has been concluded and to come to terms with what her life was. That’s a really interesting example of a play where you get different Sartrean themes.

Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others

The Blood of Others is a wonderful novel in which Beauvoir makes both feminist and ethical points. She said that she wrote the novel to express the philosophy of Pyrrhus and Cineas in literary form. It’s a 13-chapter novel that alternates points of view, so seven of the chapters are written from the perspective of a male protagonist, Jean Blomart, and six of the chapters are written from the perspective of his lover, Hélène, who is dying. So, again, you get the heightened drama about a life at its end.

Beauvoir is asking questions about what kinds of projects we should commit ourselves to if we want to live meaningful lives. It’s set in the resistance, so there are clear political projects that Jean’s deliberating about. In the case of the female character, Hélène, she occupies this mentality where the thing that is going to make her life meaningful is to give herself away in self-negating love, to completely give herself away to Jean Blomart. What Beauvoir is doing in this novel is looking at different kinds of bad faith that are typical, that are widespread, in the experience of men and women as she saw it in the 1940s.

1st UK edition. The Blood of Others. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

A clear consensus?

In the 1940s, in France, the definition of Existentialism was a matter of debate. In 1945, Sartre gave the very famous lecture ‘Existentialism is a humanism’, in which he made the famous claim that existence precedes essence, which is to say that there’s no human nature, and that you are the sum of your actions. There’s no blueprint for who you are; you choose yourself throughout the process of living. In 1947, Beauvoir wrote an essay called ‘What is Existentialism?’ because it was still something that confused people, and the existentialists themselves weren’t necessarily in agreement about what the core commitments of Existentialism were.

The historical context

One of the things that’s important to remember about France during that period is that after the war, there were two purges of intellectuals, journalists, and leaders there, because of the complicity of some of them with the occupation. There was the illegal purge, in which thousands of people were killed without trial, and there was the legal purge, in which trials were conducted, people’s guilt was established and consequences were meted out accordingly. Consequently, many of the leading voices in France disappeared from the stage, and there was a real vacuum of thought and of intellectual leadership. Sartre and Beauvoir were both well-posed to enter into this vacuum. Together, they founded the journal Les Temps Modernes, which ran until just a couple of years ago in France as a journal of the left. So, it’s certainly the case that they were part of a big moment, but the importance of the historical context of Existentialism shouldn’t be taken to mean that the philosophy wouldn’t have been meaningful without that context. The fact of the matter is that people continue to read existentialists and find their thought inspiring.

Beauvoir’s idea of freedom

Beauvoir believes that the character of human beings is established by the kinds of projects that they adopt in life; part of being free is having the freedom to choose different projects to shape your life. So, she thinks that what we should work towards, as ethical human beings, is for the freedom to choose our projects to be more equally distributed. Even in 1944, five years before she wrote The Second Sex, she recognised that although we all have this freedom, we do not all have the same power to act, to pursue the projects that we would like to pursue in the world.

This is still quite an abstract way of looking at things, and Existentialism doesn’t give us what some people would like in ethics. It doesn’t give us a decision procedure which helps us deliberate about what we should do in specific contexts, and part of the reason is because Beauvoir says that human life is ambiguous; it’s very difficult to know what is going to help me and other people pursue their projects in the world. There’s disagreement about what kinds of values we should pursue, but Beauvoir doesn’t think that the answer to that is to deny the disagreement. She thinks the answer is to be committed to the struggle to work with other human beings in order to promote freedom.

Discover more about

Existentialism

Thomas R. Flynn (2006). Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Sartre, Beauvoir and existentialism