Sartre influenced in the meantime by the criticisms of Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir, and by his increasing commitment to collectivist politics elaborated greatly his existentialist account of relations with others, taking the Hegelian idea more seriously. He no longer thinks of concrete relations so pessimistically. While Nietzsche and Heidegger both suggest the possibility of an authentic being with others, both leave it seriously under-developed.
For our purposes, there are two key ideas in the Notebooks. The first is that my projects can be realised only with the cooperation of others; however, that cooperation presupposes their freedom I cannot make her love me , and their judgements about me must concern me. Therefore permitting and nurturing the freedom of others must be a central part of all my projects.
Sartre thus commits himself against any political, social or economic forms of subjugation. An authentic existence, for Sartre, therefore means two things. Second, though, there is some minimal level of content to any authentic project: whatever else my project is, it must also be a project of freedom, for myself and for others.
Subsequently a star Normalienne , she was a writer, philosopher, feminist, lifelong partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, notorious for her anti-bourgeois way of living and her free sexual relationships which included among others a passionate affair with the American writer Nelson Algren. The debate rests of course upon the fundamental misconception that wants a body of work to exist and develop independently of or uninfluenced by its intellectual environment.
In Being and Nothingness , the groundwork of the Existentialist movement in France was published. There Sartre gave an account of freedom as ontological constitutive of the subject.
One cannot but be free: this is the kernel of the Sartrean conception of freedom. One cannot assume freedom in isolation from the freedom of others. Moreover action takes place within a certain historical context. For Merleau-Ponty the subjective free-will is always in a dialectical relationship with its historical context.
Like Sartre it is only later in her life that this will be acknowledged. In Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir offers a picture of the human subject as constantly oscillating between facticity and transcendence.
Whereas the human is always already restricted by the brute facts of his existence, nevertheless it always aspires to overcome its situation, to choose its freedom and thus to create itself. This tension must be considered positive, and not restrictive of action. The term for this tension is ambiguity. Ambiguity is not a quality of the human as substance, but a characterisation of human existence.
We are ambiguous beings destined to throw ourselves into the future while simultaneously it is our very own existence that throws us back into facticity. That is to say, back to the brute fact that we are in a sense always already destined to fail — not in this or that particular project but to fail as pure and sustained transcendence.
It is exactly because of and through this fundamental failure that we realize that our ethical relation to the world cannot be self-referential but must pass through the realization of the common destiny of the human as a failed and interrelated being.
De Beauvoir, unlike Sartre, was a scholarly reader of Hegel. There Hegel describes the movement in which self-consciousness produces itself by positing another would be self-consciousness, not as a mute object Gegen-stand but as itself self-consciousness.
It is, Hegel tells us, only because someone else recognizes me as a subject that I can be constituted as such. Outside the moment of recognition there is no self-consciousness. De Beauvoir takes to heart the Hegelian lesson and tries to formulate an ethics from it. What would this ethics be? Thus there are no recipes for ethics. This is not a point to be taken light-heartedly. It constitutes a movement of opposition against a long tradition of philosophy understanding itself as theoria : the disinterested contemplation on the nature of the human and the world.
De Beauvoir, in common with most existentialists, understands philosophy as praxis : involved action in the world and participation in the course of history. It is out of this understanding that The Second Sex is born. In English in it appeared as The Second Sex in an abridged translation. The Second Sex is an exemplary text showing how a philosophical movement can have real, tangible effects on the lives of many people, and is a magnificent exercise in what philosophy could be.
The Second Sex begins with the most obvious but rarely posed question: What is woman? De Beauvoir finds that at present there is no answer to that question. The reason is that tradition has always thought of woman as the other of man. It is only man that constitutes himself as a subject as the Absolute de Beauvoir says , and woman defines herself only through him.
But why is it that woman has initially accepted or tolerated this process whereby she becomes the other of man?
Naturally the condition of bad faith is not always the case. Often women found themselves in a sociocultural environment which denied them the very possibility of personal flourishing as happens with most of the major religious communities. A further problem that women face is that of understanding themselves as a unity which would enable them to assume the role of their choosing. Women primarily align themselves to their class or race and not to other women.
For some feminists this clearly inaugurates the problematic of the sex-gender distinction where sex denotes the biological identity of the person and gender the cultural attribution of properties to the sexed body. Thus the sex assignment a doctor pronouncing the sex of the baby is a naturalized but not at all natural normative claim which delivers the human into a world of power relations. Albert Camus was a French intellectual, writer and journalist. His multifaceted work as well as his ambivalent relation to both philosophy and existentialism makes every attempt to classify him a rather risky operation.
A recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature primarily for his novels, he is also known as a philosopher due to his non-literary work and his relation with Jean-Paul Sartre. It rather points to a deep tension within the current of thought of all thinkers associated with existentialism. The question is: With how many voices can thought speak? As we have already seen, the thinkers of existentialism often deployed more than one. Almost all of them share a deep suspicion to a philosophy operating within reason as conceived of by the Enlightenment.
Camus shares this suspicion and his so called philosophy of the absurd intends to set limits to the overambitions of Western rationality. Reason is absurd in that it believes that it can explain the totality of the human experience whereas it is exactly its inability for explanation that, for example, a moment of fall designates.
In a similar fashion Camus has also repudiated his connection with existentialism. Camus accuses Hegel subsequently Marx himself of reducing man to history and thus denying man the possibility of creating his own history, that is, affirming his freedom.
Philosophically, Camus is known for his conception of the absurd. Perhaps we should clarify from the very beginning what the absurd is not. The absurd is not nihilism. For Camus the acceptance of the absurd does not lead to nihilism according to Nietzsche nihilism denotes the state in which the highest values devalue themselves or to inertia, but rather to their opposite: to action and participation. In a world devoid of God, eternal truths or any other guiding principle, how could man bear the responsibility of a meaning-giving activity?
The absurd man, like an astronaut looking at the earth from above, wonders whether a philosophical system, a religion or a political ideology is able to make the world respond to the questioning of man, or rather whether all human constructions are nothing but the excessive face-paint of a clown which is there to cover his sadness. This terrible suspicion haunts the absurd man. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. The problem of suicide a deeply personal problem manifests the exigency of a meaning-giving response.
It would mean that man is not any more an animal going after answers, in accordance with some inner drive that leads him to act in order to endow the world with meaning. The suicide has become but a passive recipient of the muteness of the world. At the end one has to keep the absurd alive, as Camus says.
But what does it that mean? In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus tells the story of the mythical Sisyphus who was condemned by the Gods to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain and then have to let it fall back again of its own weight. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.
One must imagine then Sisyphus victorious: fate and absurdity have been overcome by a joyful contempt. Such madness can overcome the absurd without cancelling it altogether. Almost ten years after the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus Camus publishes his second major philosophical work, The Rebel Camus continues the problematic which had begun with The Myth of Sisyphus. Previously, revolt or creation had been considered the necessary response to the absurdity of existence.
Here, Camus goes on to examine the nature of rebellion and its multiple manifestations in history. The problem is that while man genuinely rebels against both unfair social conditions and, as Camus says, against the whole of creation, nevertheless in the practical administration of such revolution, man comes to deny the humanity of the other in an attempt to impose his own individuality.
Take for example the case of the infamous Marquis de Sade which Camus explores. In Sade, contradictory forces are at work see The Days of Sodom. On the one hand, Sade wishes the establishment of a certainly mad community with desire as the ultimate master, and on the other hand this very desire consumes itself and all the subjects who stand in its way. Camus goes on to examine historical manifestations of rebellion, the most prominent case being that of the French Revolution.
Camus argues that the revolution ended up taking the place of the transcendent values which it sought to abolish. An all-powerful notion of justice now takes the place formerly inhabited by God. Camus fears that all revolutions end with the re-establishment of the State. Camus is led to examine the Marxist view of history as a possible response to the failed attempts at the establishment of a true revolutionary regime.
Camus examines the similarities between the Christian and the Marxist conception of history. They both exhibit a bourgeois preoccupation with progress. History according to both views is the linear progress from a set beginning to a definite end the metaphysical salvation of man or the materialistic salvation of him in the future Communist society.
This is, Camus argues, essentially nihilistic: history, in effect, accepts that meaning creation is no longer possible and commits suicide. Because historical revolutions are for the most part nihilistic movements, Camus suggests that it is the making-absolute of the values of the revolution that necessarily lead to their negation. On the contrary a relative conception of these values will be able to sustain a community of free individuals who have not forgotten that every historical rebellion has begun by affirming a proto-value that of human solidarity upon which every other value can be based.
In the field of visual arts existentialism exercised an enormous influence, most obviously on the movement of Expressionism. Expressionism began in Germany at the beginning of the 20 th century. German Expressionism was particularly important during the birth of the new art of cinema. Perhaps the closest cinematic work to Existentialist concerns remains F. Expressionism became a world-wide style within cinema, especially as film directors like Lang fled Germany and ended up in Hollywood.
European directors such as Bergman and Godard are often associated with existentialist themes. In the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries existentialist ideas became common in mainstream cinema, pervading the work of writers and directors such as Woody Allen, Richard Linklater, Charlie Kaufman and Christopher Nolan. Given that Sartre and Camus were both prominent novelists and playwrights, the influence of existentialism on literature is not surprising.
However, the influence was also the other way. Novelists such as Dostoevsky or Kafka, and the dramatist Ibsen, were often cited by mid-century existentialists as important precedents, right along with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Dostoevsky creates a character Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov , who holds the view that if God is dead, then everything is permitted; both Nietzsche and Sartre discuss Dostoevsky with enthusiasm.
A third type of existentialism is agnostic existentialism. Again, it is a matter of choice to be agnostic. The agnostic existentialist makes no claim to know, or not know, if there is a "greater picture" in play; rather, he simply recognizes that the greatest truth is that which he chooses to act upon.
The agnostic existentialist feels that to know the "greater picture", whether there is one or not, is impossible for human minds--or if it is not impossible, that at least he has not found it yet. Like Christian existentialists, the agnostic believes existence is subjective. As mentioned above, opinions of philosophers associated with existentialism vary, sometimes greatly, over what "existentialism" is, and even if there is such a thing as "existentialism".
One version, Sartrean existentialism, is elaborated below. Sartrean existentialism Some of the tenets associated with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre include: Existence precedes essence : This is a reversal of the Aristotlean premise that essence precedes existence, where man is created to fulfil some telos and life consists of fulfilling that goal.
Unlike tools that are created to fulfill a purpose e. Identities are constructed by the individual consciousness only : As an extension of the first tenet, the individual consciousness constructs a "self" or "identity" for itself. An "identity" can include beliefs, projects, and various other things of value. Sartre argues that no one else, including God , can choose your "identity" for you. Values are subjective : Sartre accepts the premise that something is valuable because the individual consciousness chooses to value it.
Sartre denies there are any objective standards on which to base values. Responsibility for choices : The individual consciousness is responsible for all the choices he makes, regardless of the consequences.
Sartre claims that to deny the responsibility is to be in bad faith. Here, existentialists draw on psychological concepts to investigate feelings such as angst and despair that arise by being in bad faith. Condemned to be free : Because our actions and choices are ours and ours alone, we are condemned to be responsible for our free choices.
There are several terms Sartre uses in his works. Being in-itself are objects that are not free and cannot change its essence. Being for-itself are free: it does not need to be what it is and can change into what it is not.
Consciousness is usually considered being for-itself. Sartre distinguishes between positional and non-positional consciousness. Non-positional consciousness is being merely conscious of one's surroundings. Positional consciousness puts consciousness into relation of one's surroundings. This entails an explicit awareness of being conscious of one's surroundings. Sartre argues identity is constructed by this explicit awareness of consciousness. Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings?
How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint? Building on this, Heidegger, and later Sartre, dubbed the term "throwness" to describe this idea that human beings are exposed to or "thrown" into, existence - in that we have no choice to come into existence.
Existentialists consider being thrown into existence as prior to, and the horizon or context of, any other thoughts or ideas that humans have or definitions of themselves that they create.
This explanation of existentialism strongly favors a non-religious approach. Even in quoting Kierkegaard, a Christian existentialist, his words are used to support the anxiety and nothingness of the philosophy- which are definitely two fundamental elements, but not any more important than free will and decision. Criticisms of existentialism Herbert Marcuse criticized existentialism, especially in Sartre's Being and Nothingness , for projecting certain features of living in a modern, oppressive society, such as anxiety and meaninglessness, onto the nature of existence itself: "In so far as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypothesizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics.
Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory". Theodor Adorno, in his Jargon of Authenticity , criticized Heidegger's philosophy, with special attention to his use of language, as a mystifying ideology of advanced industrial society and its power structure. Roger Scruton claimed, in his book From Descartes to Wittgenstein , that both Heidegger's concept of inauthenticity and Sartre's concept of bad faith were incoherent; both deny any universal moral creed, yet speak of these concepts as if everyone were bound to abide them.
In chapter 18, he writes, "In what sense Sartre is able to 'recommend' the authenticity which consists in the purely self-made morality is unclear. He does recommend it, but, by his own argument, his recommendation can have no objective force.
Logical positivists, such as Carnap and Ayer, claim that existentialists frequently become confused over the verb "to be" in their analyses of "being". At first, it seems hard to understand how one can say much about existence as such. Traditionally, philosophers have connected the concept of existence with that of essence in such a way that the former signifies merely the instantiation of the latter.
Having an essence meant that human beings could be placed within a larger whole, a kosmos , that provided the standard for human flourishing. Entities of the first sort, exemplified by tools as they present themselves in use, are defined by the social practices in which they are employed, and their properties are established in relation to the norms of those practices.
A saw is sharp, for instance, in relation to what counts as successful cutting. Entities of the second sort, exemplified by objects of perceptual contemplation or scientific investigation, are defined by the norms governing perceptual givenness or scientific theory-construction. An available or occurrent entity instantiates some property if that property is truly predicated of it.
Human beings can be considered in this way as well. However, in contrast to the previous cases, the fact that natural and social properties can truly be predicated of human beings is not sufficient to determine what it is for me to be a human being. This, the existentialists argue, is because such properties are never merely brute determinations of who I am but are always in question.
It is what it is not and is not what it is Sartre [, ]. Human existence, then, cannot be thought through categories appropriate to things: substance, event, process. In this sense, human beings make themselves in situation: what I am cannot be separated from what I take myself to be. If such a view is not to collapse into contradiction, the notions of facticity and transcendence must be elucidated. Risking some oversimplification, they can be approached as the correlates of the two attitudes I can take toward myself: the attitude of third-person theoretical observer and the attitude of first-person practical agent.
Facticity includes all those properties that third-person investigation can establish about me: natural properties such as weight, height, and skin color; social facts such as race, class, and nationality; psychological properties such as my web of belief, desires, and character traits; historical facts such as my past actions, my family background, and my broader historical milieu; and so on.
From an existential point of view, however, this would be an error— not because these aspects of my being are not real or factual, but because the kind of being that I am cannot be defined in factual, or third-person, terms. Though third-person observation can identify skin color, class, or ethnicity, the minute it seeks to identify them as mine it must contend with the distinctive character of the existence I possess. There is no sense in which facticity is both mine and merely a matter of fact, since my existence—the kind of being I am—is also defined by the stance I take toward my facticity.
An agent is oriented by the task at hand as something to be brought about through its own will or agency. Such orientation does not take itself as a theme but loses itself in what is to be done.
Thereby, things present themselves not as indifferent givens, facts, but as meaningful: salient, expedient, obstructive, and so on. It may be—the argument runs—that I can be said to choose a course of action at the conclusion of a process of deliberation, but there seems to be no choice involved when, in the heat of the moment, I toss the useless pen aside in frustration.
But the point in using such language is simply to insist that in the first-person perspective of agency I cannot conceive myself as determined by anything that is available to me only in third-person terms. Because existence is co-constituted by facticity and transcendence, the self cannot be conceived as a Cartesian ego but is embodied being-in-the-world, a self-making in situation. Because my projects are who I am in the mode of engaged agency unlike plans that I merely represent to myself in reflective deliberation , the world in a certain sense reveals to me who I am.
For reasons to be explored in the next section, the meaning of my choice is not always transparent to me.
Existential psychoanalysis represents a kind of compromise between the first- and third-person perspectives: like the latter, it objectifies the person and treats its open-ended practical horizons as in a certain sense closed; like the former, however, it seeks to understand the choices from the inside, to grasp the identity of the individual as a matter of the first-person meaning that haunts him, rather than as a function of inert psychic mechanisms with which the individual has no acquaintance.
In the first place, while it is through my projects that the world takes on meaning, the world itself is not brought into being through my projects; it retains its otherness and thus can come forth as utterly alien, as unheimlich. This experience, basic to existential thought, contrasts most sharply with the ancient notion of a kosmos in which human beings have a well-ordered place, and it connects existential thought tightly to the modern experience of a meaningless universe.
In the second place, the world includes other people, and as a consequence I am not merely the revealer of the world but something revealed in the projects of those others. I am not merely looking through a keyhole; I am a voyeur.
I cannot originally experience myself as something—a voyeur, for instance. It is because there are others in the world that I can take a third-person perspective on myself, but this reveals the extent to which I am alienated from a dimension of my being: who I am in an objective sense can be originally revealed only by the Other.
This has implications for existential social theory see the section on Sartre: Existentialism and Marxism below. Finally, the self-understanding, or project, thanks to which the world is there for me in a meaningful way, already belongs to that world, derives from it, from the tradition or society in which I find myself.
This theme is brought out most clearly by Heidegger: the anti-Cartesian idea that the self is defined first of all by its practical engagement entails that this self is not properly individual but rather indisinguishable from anyone else das Man who engages in such practices.
The idea is something like this: Practices can allow things to show up as meaningful—as hammers, dollar bills, or artworks—because practices involve aims that carry with them norms, satisfaction conditions, for what shows up in them. But norms and rules, as Wittgenstein has shown, are essentially public, and that means that when I engage in a practice I must be essentially interchangeable with anyone else who does: I eat as one eats, I drive as one drives, I even protest as one protests.
To the extent that my activity is to be an instance of such a practice, I must do it in the normal way. If such standards traditionally derive from the essence that a particular thing instantiates—this hammer is a good one if it instantiates what a hammer is supposed to be—and if there is nothing that a human being is, by its essence, supposed to be, can the meaning of existence at all be thought?
Existentialism arises with the collapse of the idea that philosophy can provide substantive norms for existing, ones that specify particular ways of life. Authenticity—in German, Eigentlichkeit —names that attitude in which I engage in my projects as my own eigen. What this means can perhaps be brought out by considering moral evaluations.
In keeping my promise, I act in accord with duty; and if I keep it because it is my duty, I also act morally according to Kant because I am acting for the sake of duty. But existentially there is still a further evaluation to be made. But I can do the same thing authentically if, in keeping my promise for the sake of duty, acting this way is something I choose as my own , something to which, apart from its social sanction, I commit myself.
But such character might also be a reflection of my choice of myself, a commitment I make to be a person of this sort. In both cases I have succeeded in being good; only in the latter case, however, have I succeeded in being myself. Some writers have taken this notion a step further, arguing that the measure of an authentic life lies in the integrity of a narrative , that to be a self is to constitute a story in which a kind of wholeness prevails, to be the author of oneself as a unique individual Nehamas ; Ricoeur In contrast, the inauthentic life would be one without such integrity, one in which I allow my life-story to be dictated by the world.
Even interpreted narratively, then, the norm of authenticity remains a formal one. Authenticity defines a condition on self-making: do I succeed in making myself , or will who I am merely be a function of the roles I find myself in?
Thus to be authentic can also be thought as a way of being autonomous. Being a father in an authentic way does not necessarily make me a better father, but what it means to be a father has become explicitly my concern. It is here that existentialism locates the singularity of existence and identifies what is irreducible in the first-person stance.
At the same time, authenticity does not hold out some specific way of life as a norm; that is, it does not distinguish between the projects that I might choose.
The possibility of authenticity is a mark of my freedom , and it is through freedom that existentialism approaches questions of value, leading to many of its most recognizable doctrines. Existentialism did not develop much in the way of a normative ethics; however, a certain approach to the theory of value and to moral psychology, deriving from the idea of existence as self-making in situation, is a distinctive mark of the existentialist tradition.
Existential moral psychology emphasizes human freedom and focuses on the sources of mendacity, self-deception, and hypocrisy in moral consciousness. The familiar existential themes of anxiety, nothingness, and the absurd must be understood in this context. As a predicate of existence, the concept of freedom is not initially established on the basis of arguments against determinism; nor is it taken, in Kantian fashion, simply as a given of practical self-consciousness.
Rather, it is located in the breakdown of direct practical activity. Both Heidegger and Sartre believe that phenomenological analysis of the kind of intentionality that belongs to moods does not merely register a passing modification of the psyche but reveals fundamental aspects of the self. Fear, for instance, reveals some region of the world as threatening, some element in it as a threat, and myself as vulnerable.
In anxiety, as in fear, I grasp myself as threatened or as vulnerable; but unlike fear, anxiety has no direct object, there is nothing in the world that is threatening. And with this collapse of my practical immersion in roles and projects, I also lose the basic sense of who I am that is provided by these roles. In thus robbing me of the possibility of practical self-identification, anxiety teaches me that I do not coincide with anything that I factically am.
Further, since the identity bound up with such roles and practices is always typical and public, the collapse of this identity reveals an ultimately first-personal aspect of myself that is irreducible to das Man. The experience of anxiety also yields the existential theme of the absurd , a version of what was previously introduced as alienation from the world see the section on Alienation above.
So long as I am gearing into the world practically, in a seamless and absorbed way, things present themselves as meaningfully co-ordinated with the projects in which I am engaged; they show me the face that is relevant to what I am doing.
But the connection between these meanings and my projects is not itself something that I experience. So long as I am practically engaged, in short, all things appear to have reasons for being, and I, correlatively, experience myself as fully at home in the world. In the mood of anxiety, however, it is just this character that fades from the world. As when one repeats a word until it loses meaning, anxiety undermines the taken-for-granted sense of things.
They become absurd. As Roquentin sits in a park, the root of a tree loses its character of familiarity until he is overcome by nausea at its utterly alien character, its being en soi. While such an experience is no more genuine than my practical, engaged experience of a world of meaning, it is no less genuine either. An existential account of meaning and value must recognize both possibilities and their intermediaries. To do so is to acknowledge a certain absurdity to existence: though reason and value have a foothold in the world they are not, after all, my arbitrary invention , they nevertheless lack any ultimate foundation.
Values are not intrinsic to being, and at some point reasons give out. In commiting myself in the face of death—that is, aware of the nothingness of my identity if not supported by me right up to the end—the roles that I have hitherto thoughtlessly engaged in as one does now become something that I myself own up to, become responsible for.
Sartre [, 70] argues that anxiety provides a lucid experience of that freedom which, though often concealed, characterizes human existence as such. For instance, because it is not thing-like, consciousness is free with regard to its own prior states. Motives, instincts, psychic forces, and the like cannot be understood as inhabitants of consciousness that might infect freedom from within, inducing one to act in ways for which one is not responsible; rather, they can exist only for consciousness as matters of choice.
I must either reject their claims or avow them. For Sartre, the ontological freedom of existence entails that determinism is an excuse before it is a theory: though through its structure of nihilation consciousness escapes that which would define it—including its own past choices and behavior—there are times when I may wish to deny my freedom.
This is to adopt the third-person stance in which what is originally structured in terms of freedom appears as a causal property of myself. I can try to look upon myself as the Other does, but as an excuse this flight from freedom is shown to fail, according to Sartre, in the experience of anguish. For instance, Sartre writes of a gambler who, after losing all and fearing for himself and his family, retreats to the reflective behavior of resolving never to gamble again.
Friedrich Nietzsche further contended that the individual must decide which situations are to count as moral situations. Thus, most Existentialists believe that personal experience and acting on one's own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth , and that the understanding of a situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a detached, objective observer similar to the concept of Subjectivism.
According to Camus, when an individual's longing for order collides with the real world's lack of order , the result is absurdity. Human beings are therefore subjects in an indifferent, ambiguous and absurd universe , in which meaning is not provided by the natural order , but rather can be created however provisionally and unstable by human actions and interpretations. Existentialism can be atheistic , theological or theistic or agnostic.
Some Existentialists, like Nietzsche , proclaimed that "God is dead" and that the concept of God is obsolete. Others, like Kierkegaard , were intensely religious, even if they did not feel able to justify it. The important factor for Existentialists is the freedom of choice to believe or not to believe.
Existentialist-type themes appear in early Buddhist and Christian writings including those of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In the 17th Century , Blaise Pascal suggested that, without a God , life would be meaningless, boring and miserable, much as later Existentialists believed, although, unlike them, Pascal saw this as a reason for the existence of a God.
His near-contemporary, John Locke , advocated individual autonomy and self-determination , but in the positive pursuit of Liberalism and Individualism rather than in response to an Existentialist experience. It can be argued that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer were also important influences on the development of Existentialism, because the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were written in response or in opposition to them. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche , like Pascal before them, were interested in people's concealment of the meaninglessness of life and their use of diversion to escape from boredom.
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