Existentialism Flashcards
Existentialism was a much discussed philosophical view in the decades following the Second World War, the horrors and destruction of which were a prime motive for it.
Sartre and Camus were most influential in the 1950s and 1960s, not least because they expressed their respective versions of an existentialist outlook in literary forms as novels, plays and essays.
One premise of atheism is that no purpose is established for mankind from ‘outside’. Sartre and Camus emphasised the fact that individuals simply found themselves ‘thrown’ into the world without external purpose or guide, as a blind outcome of natural events.
They gave the name ‘absurdity’ to this accidental and purposeless brute fact of existence.
Sartre describes the possession of a free will as an ‘agony’ because it forces us to make choices in the face of existence’s emptiness.
‘Absurdity’ is the key notion applied by existentialists to the human condition, meaning by it that there is no extrinsic meaning, purpose or value to human existence: it is absurd in being wholly accidental and in itself pointless.
“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and unreasonable silence of the world.” - The Myth of Sisyphus
This characterisation is not intended to be, as it at first appears when so baldly stated, pessimistic or nihilistic. Rather, it is the starting point for the claim that individuals must, in response, create meaning in their lives by asserting the value of freedom, creativity and love and attributing dignity to human beings.
‘The theatre of the absurd’ has its roots in the climate of thought of which Camus’s doctrine of the absurd is a characteristic feature. The characters in the works are troubled and displaced, unable to attach sense to the world they find themselves lost in, and which seems obscurely to menace them.
The bitter experience of the Second World War and the collapse of religious certainties conspired to produce the bewilderment and insecurity explored in these plays.
In the existentialist philosophy of Sartre the concept of bad faith plays a crucial role. Sartre employs the term to denote the state into which individuals get themselves if they refuse to accept that they are ‘condemned to freedom’ in their lives. People display bad faith, or indeed live in bad faith, when they deny their freedom by avoiding their duty to take responsibility for themselves, thereby allowing themselves to be treated as objects.
