existential nihilism essay

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Existentialism & Nihilism: What’s the Difference?

What is the purpose of life? Well, is there a purpose? Existentialism and Nihilism both tackle these questions head-on with differing perspectives.

Since the beginning of time, humans have come up with various philosophies and ideologies concerning the true purpose of our existence. Although we won’t know the blatant truth until our time has come, it’s still enjoyable to ponder all of the theories in the meantime. Two philosophies that stand out amongst the others are Existentialism and Nihilism . From afar they might appear similar, but you’ll soon realize how different they really are.

Before moving forward I’d like to address that there are many different branches of both Existentialism and Nihilism. In this article, I will be discussing Jean-Paul Sartre’s take on Existentialism and Existential Nihilism.

What Is Existentialism?

Existentialism is a philosophy that originated in Europe and became extremely popular after the devastating events of WWII. One of the first people to describe themselves as an existentialist was a man by the name of Jean-Paul Sartre . The basis of his thought can be summed up as follows: “What all existentialists have in common is the fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence.” To put this in simpler terms– we as human beings have no predefined box that we must fit into.

We create meaning for our lives by the decisions we make and the paths we decide to go down. This does not mean we can do whatever we want without consequence, as the actions we take define who we are. So, if you say “I am a kind person”– but then proceed to viciously insult people, an existentialist will look at you and determine that you are in fact very mean, despite what you claim to be. This is because you are being judged based on the actions you take, and not by what you think you are. You are held fully accountable for your behavior and this shapes your reality moving forward.

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According to Sartre, one day a student of his walked up and asked for advice about a moral dilemma he was facing. The boy could either join the military and become a small part of a large movement, or he could stay home and take care of his mother– making him the focal point of her entire life as she could barely take care of herself. Sartre told him that there was no right answer. It was up to the boy to decide what he deemed to be more important, thus giving him free will to decide his path. Existentialism tells us that we are the artists of our lives, and we are free to create our own destinies– we have no ineluctable fate. There are millions of different paths to choose from and we are not bound to a singular timeline. What a freeing thought indeed!

Having an Existential Crisis? 

Alas, on the downside of such freedom , many people may face something called existential dread . This means that they are overwhelmed by the amount of uncertainties life has to offer. For example– imagine being alive in the olden days, completely fine with following your religion because that is all you have ever known, until one afternoon a philosopher announces: “Actually… we come from nothing! Nevermind about that whole worshiping God ordeal!”. You would likely be taken on a roller coaster of emotions, as you begin to have an existential crisis. Without religion or a set of rules to follow, one might become anxious at the idea of “not knowing”. Not knowing what’s next, not knowing why we’re here, and not knowing what the grand purpose is to life.

Ironically, that is the beauty of existentialism – we create our grand purpose in life without any preconceived ideas getting in the way. Life does not give us meaning, but we give meaning to life.

What Is Nihilism?

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning, and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.” Albert Camus

Nihilism is another European philosophy that arose during the 19th century when people started to become tired of the local governments and wondered what made people in power more important than your average joe. The masses also started to question religion, after philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that “ God is dead ”. Well, if God is dead… what has been the point of all the worship and dedication to serving said “God”? The rise of this thought process alone led many people to question the purpose of everything if we came from nothing.

The word itself comes from the Latin term, nihil , which means “nothing”. What makes someone a better candidate to rule a nation, if everyone was born from nothingness? If there was no real point to anything, why do some people get to be treated better than others? These are a few questions that a Nihilist would ask you.

To get into the mind of the Nihilist and fully understand the theories of Nihilism better, ask yourself why you believe what you believe. Where did the idea come from and why was it presented to you? Who created your belief system and why? If you keep digging deeper, you will get to a point where there is no longer a definitive answer. Regardless of religion or science, the question “why” or “what is the point” will never have a direct answer. This is where Nihilism comes into play. The conclusion to them is that there is no purpose or answer. We are here merely to just survive and someday die. Nothing we do truly matters, as we do not know the tangible source of where we were before life and where we will go after.

Nihilists quite literally believe in nothingness. They do not believe there is good in the world, nor do they believe there is bad. It is the idea that our world simply exists, as it did before humans came around. Our planet did not give us a tangible list of rules to follow, therefore humans created the ideology of morality themselves. A nihilist would ask– “well, what human was deemed important enough to create such morality laws?” . No answer could possibly satisfy the nihilist mind.

Nihilism claims that there is no grand idea or purpose, so therefore there is no meaning to life. Life is what you make it, but don’t become too attached, because we all have the same fate: death. How uplifting! Although, it can feel liberating to accept this mindset. If nothing matters, why not have fun and do whatever you please?

The Difference Between Existentialism and Nihilism

“ Why do we argue? Life’s so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.” Alan Moore

The questions that arise with Nihilism are answered with the ideologies of Existentialism. Nihilism says nothing matters because we came from nothingness, so do whatever you want because who cares about anything! They claim there is no objective meaning to life, therefore there is no purpose.

Existentialism comes in and says that you give meaning to your life. Regardless if we came from nothing– you are here now and that is what matters. As long as you are alive at this very moment, you can decide your fate and nobody can take that power away from you. Your grand purpose is to create a life you believe is worth living. Live as your most authentic self , without the opinions of others swaying you in different directions. When we take away the restrictions of religion or the limitations of social structures, we are only left with ourselves. Who are you when nobody’s looking? Who are you if you were born into a white box, hidden far away from the teachings of others– it’s just you and your own ideas, who are you then?

A Nihilist would answer that question and say you are “nothing” and “it wouldn’t matter”. An Existentialist would say you are “anything you’d like to be” as you create your reality. And that is the grand difference between the two– one decides that if there’s no God or source, there’s no point. The other says perhaps you are a God, as your life’s destiny is in your own hands based on the choices you make.

Of course, there is no right or wrong answer here– it’s all a matter of preference on how you would like to view your life. That’s the beauty of philosophy, you won’t be condemned to an eternity of hellfire if you decide that this mindset is not for you. The key takeaway from both of these philosophies is to do what makes you happy in the short time we are alive on this planet.

What is Nihilism?

By Nicole Becker BA Anthropology and Sociology Nicole is a writer and artist based out of the United States. She also specializes in holistic healing and metaphysics. Aside from philosophical research, she enjoys writing descriptive poetry and fantasy literature. In her free time, you can find Nicole reading, playing games, or meditating with her cat Miso.

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Photo bt Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos

The risk of nihilism is that it alienates us from anything good or true. Yet believing in nothing has positive potential

by Nolen Gertz   + BIO

Nihilism is a constant threat. As the 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt recognised, it is best understood not as a set of ‘dangerous thoughts’, but as a risk inherent in the very act of thinking. If we reflect on any specific idea long enough, no matter how strong it seems at first, or how widely accepted, we’ll start to doubt its truth. We might also begin to doubt whether those who accept the idea really know (or care) about whether or not the idea is true. This is one step away from thinking about why there is so little consensus about so many issues, and why everyone else seems to be so certain about what now appears to you so uncertain. At this point, on the brink of nihilism, there’s a choice: either keep thinking and risk alienating yourself from society; or stop thinking and risk alienating yourself from reality.

A century before Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche described in his notebooks (published posthumously by his sister in The Will to Power ) a choice between ‘active ‘ and ‘passive’ nihilism. One of his many aphorisms on nihilism was that it is the result of the highest values devaluing themselves. Values such as truth and justice can come to feel like they are not merely ideas, but that they have some supernatural power, particularly when we say: ‘The truth will set you free’ or ‘Justice will be served.’ When these values turn out not to have the power attributed to them, when truth turns out not to be liberating, when justice doesn’t ensue, we become disillusioned. Yet, rather than blame ourselves for putting too much faith in these values, we instead blame the values for not living up to our expectations.

According to Nietzsche, we can then become active nihilists and reject the values given to us by others in order to erect values of our own. Or we can become passive nihilists and continue to believe in traditional values, despite having doubts about the true value of those values. The active nihilist destroys in order to find or create something worth believing in. Only that which can survive destruction can make us stronger. Nietzsche and the group of 19th-century Russians who self-identified as nihilists shared this outlook. The passive nihilist however does not want to risk self-destruction, and so clings to the safety of traditional beliefs. Nietzsche argues that such self-protection is in reality an even more dangerous form of self-destruction. To believe just for the sake of believing in something can lead to a superficial existence, to the complacent acceptance of believing anything believed by others, because believing in something (even if it turns out to be nothing worth believing in) will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything , to taking the risk of staring into the abyss – a metaphor for nihilism that appears frequently in Nietzsche’s work.

Today, nihilism has become an increasingly popular way to describe a widespread attitude towards the current state of the world. Yet when the term is used in conversation, in newspaper editorials or in social media rants, it is rarely ever defined, as if everyone knows very well what nihilism means and shares the same definition of the concept. But as we have seen, nihilism can be both active and passive. If we want a better understanding of contemporary nihilism, we should identify how it has evolved in epistemology, ethics and metaphysics, and how it has found expression in different ways of life, such as in self-denial, death-denial and world-denial.

I n epistemology (the theory of knowledge), nihilism is often seen as the denial that knowledge is possible, the stance that our most cherished beliefs have no bedrock. The argument for epistemological nihilism is based on the idea that knowledge requires something more than just a knower and a known. That something more is typically seen as what makes knowledge objective, as the ability to refer to something outside of one’s personal, subjective experience is what separates knowledge from mere opinion.

But for epistemological nihilism, there is no standard, no foundation, no ground upon which one can make knowledge claims, nothing to justify our belief that any particular claim is true. All appeals to objectivity seen from the perspective of epistemological nihilism are illusory. We create the impression of knowledge to hide the fact that there are no facts. For example, as Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), we can certainly develop very complicated and very successful models for describing reality, which we can use to discover a wealth of new ‘facts’, but we can never prove that these correspond to reality itself – they could simply derive from our particular model of reality.

If something is claimed to be true based on past experience, then the problem of induction arises: just because something has happened does not entail that it must happen again. If something is claimed to be true based on scientific evidence, then there arises the problem of appealing to authority. In logic, such appeals are seen as committing a fallacy, as the claims of others, even the claims of experts, are not seen as grounds for truth. In other words, even experts can be biased and can make mistakes. Furthermore, as scientists make claims based on the work of previous scientists, then they too can be seen as making appeals to authority. This leads to another problem, the problem of infinite regress. Any claim to knowledge based on some foundation inevitably leads to questions about the foundation of that foundation, and then the foundation of that foundation, and so on, and so on, and so on.

In trivialising doubts about knowledge, the passive nihilist trivialises the pursuit of knowledge

At this point, it might seem that what I am here calling ‘epistemological nihilism’ is really no different than skepticism. For the skeptic likewise questions the foundations upon which knowledge claims are taken to rest, and doubts the possibility of knowledge ever finding any sure ground. Here it would be useful to return to Nietzsche’s distinction between active and passive nihilism. Whereas the active nihilist would be similar to the radical skeptic, the passive nihilist would not be. The passive nihilist is aware that skeptical questions can be raised about knowledge. But rather than doubt knowledge, the passive nihilist continues to believe in knowledge. Consequently, for the passive nihilist, knowledge exists, but it exists on the basis of faith.

Nihilism is therefore not only to be found in the person who rejects knowledge claims for lacking an indubitable foundation. Rather, a person who is aware of the doubts surrounding knowledge claims and who nevertheless continues to act as though those doubts don’t really matter is also a nihilist.

Scientific theories can be based on appeals to other theories, which are based on appeals to other theories, any one of which could be based on a mistake. But so long as scientific theories continue to produce results – especially results in the form of technological advances – then doubts about the ultimate truth of those theories can be seen as trivial. And in trivialising doubts about knowledge, the passive nihilist trivialises the pursuit of knowledge.

In other words, for the passive nihilist, knowledge doesn’t matter. Just think about how often words such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘certainty’ are used haphazardly in everyday life. Someone says that they know the train is coming, and either we don’t ask how they know or, if we do ask, we’re often met with the absolute foundation for knowledge in contemporary life: because their phone says so. The phone might turn out to be right, in which case the phone’s claim to authority is preserved. Or the phone might turn out to be wrong, in which case we are likely to blame not the phone but the train. Since the phone has become our primary guarantor of knowledge, to admit that the phone could be wrong is to risk having to admit that not only could our phone-based knowledge claims be baseless, but that all of our knowledge claims could be. After all, just like with the phone, we tend not to ask why we think we know what we think we know. In this way, passive nihilism becomes, not a radical ‘postmodern’ position, but rather a normal part of everyday life.

I n moral philosophy, nihilism is seen as the denial that morality exists. As Donald A Crosby argues in The Specter of the Absurd (1988), moral nihilism can be seen as a consequence of epistemological nihilism. If there exist no grounds for making objective claims about knowledge and truth, then there exist no grounds for making objective claims about right and wrong. In other words, what we take to be morality is a matter of what is believed to be right – whether that belief is relative to each historical period, to each culture or to each individual – rather than a matter of what is right.

To claim that something is right has been done historically by basing these claims on a foundation such as God, or happiness, or reason. Because these foundations are seen as applying universally – as applying to all people, in all places, in all times – they are seen as necessary to make morality apply universally.

The 18th-century moral philosopher Immanuel Kant recognised the danger of grounding morality on God or on happiness as leading to moral skepticism. The belief in God can motivate people to act morally, but only as a means to the end of ending up in heaven rather than hell. The pursuit of happiness can motivate people to act morally, but we can’t be certain in advance what action will result in making people happy. So, in response, Kant argued for a reason-based morality instead. According to him, if a universal foundation is what morality needs, then we should simply make decisions in accordance with the logic of universalisability. By determining what we are trying to achieve in any action, and by turning that intention into a law that all rational beings must obey, we can use reason to determine if it is logically possible for the intended action to be universalised. Logic – rather than God or desire – can therefore tell us if any intended action is right (universalisable) or wrong (not universalisable).

There are, however, several problems with trying to base morality on reason. One such problem, as pointed out by Jacques Lacan in ‘Kant with Sade’ (1989), is that using universalisability as the criterion of right and wrong can let clever people (such as the Marquis de Sade) justify some seemingly horrific actions if they can manage to show that those actions can actually pass Kant’s logic test. Another problem, as pointed out by John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism (1861), is that humans are rational, but rationality is not all that we have, and so following Kantian morality forces us to live like uncaring robots rather than like people.

Yet another problem, as pointed out by Nietzsche, is that reason might not be what Kant claimed it to be, as it is quite possible that reason is no firmer a foundation than is God or happiness. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche argued that reason is not something absolute and universal but rather something that has evolved over time into part of human life. In much the same way that mice in a lab experiment can be taught to be rational, so too have we learned to become rational thanks to centuries of moral, religious and political ‘experiments’ in training people to be rational. Reason should not be seen therefore as a firm foundation for morality since its own foundations can be called into question.

The passive nihilist would rather navigate using a faulty compass than risk feeling completely lost

Here again we can find an important distinction between how the active nihilist and the passive nihilist respond to such moral skepticism. The ability to doubt the legitimacy of any possible foundation for morality can lead the active nihilist to either redefine morality or to reject morality. In the first instance, actions can be judged using moral principles, but the active nihilist is the one who determines those principles. But what seems to be creative could in fact be derivative, as it is difficult to distinguish when we are thinking for ourselves as opposed to when we are thinking in accordance with how we were brought up.

So rather than such moral egoism, it is more likely that the active nihilism will simply reject morality altogether. Instead, actions are judged only in practical terms, such as what is more or less efficient towards achieving a desired end. Human actions are therefore seen as no different than the actions of an animal or a machine. If it seems like a mistake to say that an animal is evil for eating another animal when it is hungry, then the active nihilist will say it is likewise a mistake to say that humans are evil for stealing from another human when they are hungry.

Without morality, concepts such as theft, property or rights are seen as having only legal standing. Actions can be seen as criminal but not as immoral. An example of such active nihilism can be seen in the Ancient Greek sophist Thrasymachus. In Plato’s Republic , Thrasymachus argues that ‘justice’ is merely propaganda used by the strong to oppress the weak, by tricking them into accepting such oppression as what is just.

The passive nihilist, on the other hand, doesn’t reject traditional morality just because its legitimacy can be questioned. Instead, the passive nihilist rejects the idea that the legitimacy of morality really matters. The passive nihilist obeys morality, not for the sake of morality, but for the sake of obedience. To live in accordance with what is believed by others to be right and wrong, to be good and evil, is seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to having to live without any such moral standards to guide decision-making. Moral standards provide a compass, and the passive nihilist would rather navigate life using a faulty compass than risk going through life feeling completely lost.

Moral standards also provide the feeling of belonging to a community. Sharing norms and values is as important for sharing a way of life as is sharing a language. In rejecting morality, the active nihilist is therefore also rejecting community. But the passive nihilist is unwilling to risk feeling completely alone in the world. So, by rejecting moral legitimacy, the passive nihilist is embracing community. What matters to the passive nihilist then is not whether a moral claim is true, but whether a moral claim is popular.

This means that, for the passive nihilist, morality doesn’t matter. The passive nihilist values morality as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. Because the desire to belong and to be led outweighs the desire to have moral certainty, the passive nihilist cares only about the sense of direction and the sense of community that can come from accepting a moral system. The passive nihilist is like a spectator at a sporting event who roots for the home team just because that’s what everyone else is doing. The passive nihilist supports moral standards just because they are accepted by the community to which the passive nihilist wants to belong.

J ust as epistemological nihilism can lead to moral nihilism, so moral nihilism can lead to political nihilism. Political nihilism is typically understood as the rejection of authority. This was the case with the aforementioned self-identified nihilists of 19th-century Russia, who ultimately succeeded in assassinating the tsar. However, this revolutionary form of political nihilism, which we can identify with active nihilism, does not capture the passive form of political nihilism.

The danger of active nihilism comes from its anarchic willingness to destroy society for the sake of freedom. The danger of passive nihilism comes from its conformist willingness to destroy freedom for the sake of society. As we have already seen, the passive nihilist instrumentalises knowledge and morality by treating both as important only insofar as they serve as means to the ends of comfort and security. The need to feel protected from the discomfort of doubt and from the insecurity of instability is what leads the passive nihilist to become ultimately more destructive than the active nihilist.

The danger here is that the moral and political systems that promote freedom and independence will be seen as less desirable to the passive nihilist than the moral and political systems that promote dogmatic acceptance of tradition and blind obedience to authority. Though we might say we want to be free and independent, such liberation can feel like a terrible burden. This was expressed for example by Søren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) when he described anxiety as the ‘dizziness of freedom’ that arises when we look down at what appears to us as the ‘abyss’ of endless possibility. Just think of how often being presented with a menu full of options leads restaurant-goers to ask the server for a recommendation. Or how Netflix went from promoting its vast library of movies for you to choose from to promoting its algorithm that would let you ‘chill’ while it makes choices for you.

Nihilism can be promoted by those in power who benefit from such crises

Nietzsche was worried by what he saw as the growing acceptance of selflessness, self-sacrifice and self-denial as moral ideals. He saw the acceptance of such self-negating ideals as evidence that passive nihilism was spreading like a disease through 19th-century Europe. In the 20th century, Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom (1941) similarly worried about what he described as the ‘fear of freedom’ spreading across Europe. It was this worry that motivated the work of both critical theorists in Germany and of existentialists in France.

Arendt warned that we should be careful not to think of nihilism as merely a personal crisis of uncertainty. Rather, we must recognise that nihilism is a political crisis. Nihilism can be promoted by those in power who benefit from such crises. Hence even metaphysical nihilism can carry political weight. Accepting that the universe is meaningless can lead to viewing concerns about oppression, about war, about the environment as meaningless too. For this reason, it is not only politicians who can benefit from nihilism.

According to Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), one of the forms that nihilism can take is nostalgia – the desire to return to how free we felt as children before we discovered as adults that freedom entails responsibility. Corporations can therefore also benefit from promoting nihilism in the form of selling us nostalgia and other ways to distract ourselves from reality. This is why we must not only recognise the nihilism in ourselves, but also recognise that it exists in the world around us, and identify the sources of that nihilism. Rather than letting ourselves feel powerless in a world that seems to have stopped caring, we should ask where nihilistic views of the world are coming from, and who benefits from our seeing the world that way.

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Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality

James Tartaglia, Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality , Bloomsbury, 2016, 218pp., $112.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781474247702.

Reviewed by Guy Bennett-Hunter, University of Edinburgh

There are many philosophical arguments for the conclusion that life has meaning. Therefore, to argue for nihilism (the claim that, not only life but the whole of reality is meaningless (ix)) is to claim that every argument for meaning in life contains some error. This ambitious undertaking is apparently central to James Tartaglia's book: as he bluntly puts it, 'nihilism is just a fact.' (19). I have in print endorsed one of the arguments for life's meaning which Tartaglia explicitly opposes. [1] But, while I disagree with this apparently central claim, I am sympathetic to another view for which this book makes an intriguing case: that 'tending the space of transcendence' is one of philosophy's central tasks (183).

A helpful introduction and opening chapter summarise Tartaglia's views, setting out his argument for the truth of nihilism. Tartaglia argues that, to conclude that life has meaning, we would have to produce not only a causal explanation of how humans came to exist, but an explanation that also warrants the attribution of a purpose to human life -- a teleological explanation of what we are here for . The requisite explanation would, in these two senses (causal and teleological), 'tell us why we exist' and thus explain the meaning of life (2). Since he believes that there is no such convincing explanation, Tartaglia's conclusion is that life is meaningless. However, he reassures us that our inability to make sense of reality, and therefore life, as a whole does not prevent us from making sense of things within that reality: we can explain and make sense of things within a certain limited context. But the groundlessness of this context entails 'that our reasons are ultimately groundless: they are reasons given within an existence that is itself lacking in reason'; in short, 'things make sense so long as we do not push too far' (43).

In an appendix to his introduction (12-19), Tartaglia summarily disposes of some of the existing arguments to the contrary, except the one with which I agree: that put forward by David E. Cooper (18-9). [2] He promises to dispatch this argument fully in Chapter 2 (18) and states that it is characterised by 'subtle differences' from his own position, which, he says, are 'to be evaluated when my position is on the table' (19). However, Cooper's work is not mentioned again.

Chapter 2 provides a survey of 'misguided' strategies for coping with nihilism, including the idea of a transcendent context of meaning (which may be intended as an implicit reference to Cooper), humanism, and relativism. While not a comprehensive survey, this chapter clearly articulates what Tartaglia thinks is wrong with many of the existing attempts to argue that life has meaning. He compares life to a game of chess and the idea that life has meaning to the possibility of achieving checkmate, which may motivate a person's moves in the game. However, the nihilist believes that 'checkmate is an illusion' (43). So we are counselled instead to refocus our attention on the moves themselves, which we may previously have thought of as merely intermediate goals. Having discovered that they are, in fact, 'the only real goals', we must value them 'for their own sake' (43). Against the charge that nihilism would encourage us to take life less seriously, Tartaglia asserts that 'there is nothing outside of life for us to take more seriously' than that meaningless life itself (44).

Chapter 3 defends the role of philosophical questioning (about the meaning of life and about how we ought to live) in opening up 'the space of transcendence'. Given the foregoing argument for nihilism, Tartaglia reassures the reader that nihilism is compatible with the idea of transcendence: it 'simply holds that there is no transcendent context of meaning .' (77). Chapter 4 persuasively defends transcendence on the basis that 'consciousness seems to transcend the world of objective thought', raising 'the prospect that reality transcends the physical universe' (85). Chapter 5, 'the key to this book' (11), sets out 'the transcendent hypothesis' in further detail, again with specific reference to consciousness. It suggests that the phenomenon of consciousness 'must be identified with something within a wider context of existence than the world it presents'; this gives us reason to accept the hypothesis 'that the objective, physical world is transcended' (104). Here, Tartaglia's suggestion resembles those of existential phenomenologists like the early Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who conclude that human consciousness (even when we concede that it is inescapably embodied), cannot be understood as a purely objective, physical object or process within the world, since it is that by which there is a meaningful world of objects for us at all. [3]

In Chapters 6 and 7, Tartaglia applies the transcendent hypothesis to make philosophical sense of time and universals, respectively -- both of which, he believes, turn out to provide additional philosophical routes to transcendence. While time is part of the objective world, 'the temporal perspective of "now" transcends the objective world' and 'the moving present conception is the result of illegitimately superimposing the transcendent "now" upon the objective order' (144). Similarly, 'we have a perspective on the objective world which presupposes universals, but universals cannot belong to the objective world', so we may conclude that universals 'are misrepresentations of transcendent being' (161). The volume concludes with a summary reminding the reader once again that the transcendent hypothesis is not incompatible with nihilism, because 'there is no reason a transcendent context should be a context of meaning; that would be an extra claim' (170).

Tartaglia's argument for nihilism turns on the idea that a successful explanation of life's meaning would have to be both causal and teleological. But why do we need to know anything about human origins or believe that human life exists for some purpose in order to suppose that life has meaning? As Leszek Kołakowski points out, it is not even necessary for meaning-conferring explanations to be true, as in the case with genealogical myths or myths of human origins, which combine 'truth' and 'poetry' in varying proportions, perhaps to the degree where the myth is wholly 'false' in purely factual terms. But the question of factual truth seems irrelevant to the function of such mythological explanations, which is not merely to provide 'interesting information about a community's genealogy' but also to provide a 'principle of legitimacy' that gives 'meaning to the community's continuing existence -- a meaning defined and situated, so to speak, at the source of being'. [4] There is no reason to think that mythological explanations of the origins of humanity as a whole function any differently. If it is unnecessary for mythological explanations to be literally true in order to confer meaning on life, why should we insist that all explanations of life's meaning be causal and teleological in nature?

As I mentioned at the outset, a successful argument for nihilism would imply that all arguments for meaning in life are erroneous. I have already observed that Tartaglia fails explicitly to refute Cooper's argument for this conclusion but, in my view, he fails to do so implicitly as well. Cooper argues that nihilism would undermine what Tartaglia calls the 'social meaning' (15) of our practices and, in the end, would be unendurable, because 'An activity whose point is to contribute to something that itself turns out to be pointless retrospectively inherits this pointlessness.' [5] We could not actually bear to continue living our lives if experience really were structured in this way. The fact that most of us do bear it suggests that it is not usually so structured. The unavailability of checkmate would undermine the meaning of the moves in the game of chess, which have no inherent meaning for which they might be valued 'for their own sake'. Their meaning just consists in their contribution to the possibility of checkmate. Therefore, given that the game continues, there is a logical as well as a psychological need to suppose that life has meaning and nihilism is false. Tartaglia's implicit response to this line of reasoning is that we simply refrain from pushing too far with our questioning regarding meaning. In order to live a normal life, the most that we need is the presupposition 'that our goals are worthwhile while we are engaged with them' (47). 'Nihilism tells us that life has no overall goal, but we can still act as if it did' (172). 'Of course we do not need to take up the theoretical question of what -- if anything -- makes our goals worthwhile in order to presuppose them; we do this effortlessly as soon as we stop thinking about it' (47).

It is most odd to encounter a sentence in a philosophy book that amounts to an encouragement to stop thinking . But this is the essence of Tartaglia's implicit response to Cooper. We would need an additional claim to the transcendent hypothesis in order to conclude that life has meaning: we would also need the claim that the transcendent context is a transcendent context of meaning . While Cooper thinks that we need this additional claim because, manifestly, life is (on the whole) bearable and would be unendurable without it, Tartaglia thinks that life is endurable, even without this claim -- as long as we stop thinking about it . In my view, this is no refutation of Cooper's argument. And it is surely incumbent upon philosophers, of all people, to push a given line of questioning as far as it will go, even if the potential consequences may be judged unwelcome or disturbing. While Tartaglia is right to claim that 'you do not need transcendent meaning if nihilism is morally neutral and simply a fact', it takes only one sound argument for life's meaning to falsify nihilism. Tartaglia has not shown this particular argument to be unsound.

However, it may not matter that the truth of nihilism is still in question, because not only is nihilism 'boring' (7), it is also dispensable to 'the key to this book' (11): Tartaglia's project of establishing the transcendent hypothesis. This hypothesis is at best compatible with nihilism. It neither entails it nor follows from it. Tartaglia concedes that 'the existence of transcendent reality has no effect on the truth of nihilism' (145) and that 'if reality is transcendent, then nihilism may not be true' (179). In light of these concessions, the first half of Tartaglia's book looks dispensable, if not irrelevant, to the second.

Regarding the second half, in which Tartaglia defends the transcendent hypothesis: this is where I find myself in most agreement. However, this defence would have benefitted from reference to Karl Jaspers, whose philosophical project is extremely close to Tartaglia's at this point. Both aim to account for the meaning of scientific inquiry and human existence in the light of transcendence, all three of which are modes of Jaspers's 'Encompassing'. Tartaglia's claim that experience is not part of the objective world described by science, and his view that 'experience and the objective world are both parts of an interpretation of transcendent reality' (122, 176), are consonant with Jaspers's tripartite system. Jaspers, who consistently opposed dogmatic religious and superstitious misinterpretations of transcendence in favour of 'philosophical faith', would agree that 'Once transcendence is disentangled from religious meaning, its philosophical potential is released.' (171). [6] Tartaglia shares Jaspers's philosophical aim of steering a course between denying transcendence entirely and appearing to affirm it, but to filling the space with objective (religious or superstitious) realities (180). He shares Jaspers's vision of philosophy's task of 'tending the space of transcendence' (183), which, for Jaspers, is passed like a torch from one philosophical generation to the next, sometimes only as a 'glimmering spark', until the next, greater thinker can rekindle it to a brighter flame. [7] Tartaglia would have found much in Jaspers that would have helped to shape this key to his book.

The unstated affinities between Tartaglia's aims and those of Jaspers indicate, to this reader, that the concept of ineffability would have been a more fitting companion to the transcendent hypothesis than nihilism. The very argument that Tartaglia fails to refute concludes that there is a context of meaning but that this is, as he correctly states, 'an ineffable mystery which provides the measure of human existence -- something "beyond" the human but still intimate with it' (18-19). If Cooper at times resists the language of 'transcendence', this is in order discourage the incoherent misinterpretation of his 'ineffable mystery' as a Kantian noumenal realm, a cosmos, or a god that 'transcends' the human world in an analogous way to the extra-terrestrial beings that Tartaglia imagines ( 49). [8] Such a conception would render the resultant explanation of life's meaning circular, because it would explain life in terms of some of the very concepts and meanings with which that life is itself invested, or (in the case of Tartaglia's aliens) in terms of what is 'just as much a part of the physical universe as we are' (49). Given the falsity of nihilism, an explanation for life's meaning that avoids this circularity is required. Such an explanation is provided by Cooper's appeal to the concept of ineffability, which confers meaning on life precisely by referring to a determinately contentless context of meaning, beyond (though intimate with) life itself. Compatible (like nihilism) with the transcendent hypothesis, the appeal to ineffability explains the meaning of life in terms of a transcendent context of meaning -- but not a causal or teleological one, which would render the explanation circular. It would have provided everything that Tartaglia requires of nihilism without the dispensable and untenable conclusion that life, and therefore the practices and projects that contribute to it, is meaningless.

This reader found the unorthodox practice of referring to endnotes using superscript and subscript anchors, depending on the notes' contents, an occasional distraction from the fluidity of the text itself. On the whole, Tartaglia's book is an intriguing contribution to the ongoing philosophical discussion regarding the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life and is written in a lucid and engaging style.

[1] Guy Bennett-Hunter, Ineffability and Religious Experience (Routledge, 2014), Ch. 2.

[2] David E. Cooper, 'Life and Meaning', Ratio 18 (2005): 125-37, on 128; The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery (Clarendon Press, 2002).

[3] See, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception , trans. C. Smith (Routledge, 2002), 105.

[4] Leszek Kołakowski, 'The Demise of Historical Man', in Is God Happy? Selected Essays (Penguin, 2012), 264-276, on 264.

[5] Cooper, 'Life and Meaning', 128.

[6] Karl Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation , trans. E. B. Ashton (Collins, 1967), 340; Bennett-Hunter, Ineffability and Religious Experience , Ch. 5.

[7] Reason and Existenz: Five Lectures , trans. W. Earle (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 141.

[8] Cooper, 'Life and Meaning', 133-4.

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Many thousands of Parisians packed into his public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism , towards the end of 1945 and the culmination of World War 2. That lecture offered an accessible version of his difficult treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943), which had been published two years earlier, and it also responded to contemporary Marxist and Christian critics of Sartre’s “existentialism”. Sartre was much more than just a traditional academic philosopher, however, and this begins to explain his renown. He also wrote highly influential works of literature, inflected by philosophical concerns, like Nausea (1938), The Roads to Freedom trilogy (1945–49), and plays like No Exit (1947), Flies (1947), and Dirty Hands (1948), to name just a few. He founded and co-edited Les Temps Modernes and mobilised various forms of political protest and action. In short, he was a celebrity and public intellectual par excellence, especially in the period after Liberation through to the early 1960s. Responding to some calls to prosecute Sartre for civil disobedience, the then French President Charles de Gaulle replied that you don’t arrest Voltaire.

While Sartre’s public renown remains, his work has had less academic attention in the last thirty or so years ago, and earlier in France, dating roughly from the rise of “post-structuralism” in the 1960s. Although Gilles Deleuze dedicated an article to his “master” in 1964 in the wake of Sartre’s attempt to refuse the Nobel Prize for literature (Deleuze 2004), Michel Foucault influentially declared Sartre’s late work was a “magnificent and pathetic attempt of a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century” (Foucault 1966 [1994: 541–2]) [ 1 ] . In this entry, however, we seek to show what remains alive and of ongoing philosophical interest in Sartre, covering many of the most important insights of his most famous philosophical book, Being and Nothingness . In addition, significant parts of his oeuvre remain under-appreciated and thus we seek to introduce them. Little attention has been given to Sartre’s earlier, psychologically motivated philosophical works, such as Imagination (1936) or its sequel, The Imaginary (1940). Likewise, few philosophers have seriously grappled with Sartre’s later works, including his massive two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), or his various works in existential psychoanalysis that examine the works of Genet and Baudelaire, as well as his multi-volume masterpiece on Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–2). These are amongst the works of which Sartre was most proud and we outline some of their core ideas and claims.

1. Life and Works

2. transcendence of the ego: the discovery of intentionality, 3. imagination, phenomenology and literature, 4.1. negation and freedom, 4.2 bad faith and the critique of freudian psychoanalysis, 4.3 the look, shame and intersubjectivity, 5. existential psychoanalysis and the fundamental project, 6. existentialist marxism: critique of dialectical reason, 7. politics and anti-colonialism, a. primary literature, b. secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Sartre’s life has been examined by many biographies, starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s Adieux (and, subsequently, Cohen-Solal 1985; Levy 2003; Flynn 2014; Cox 2019). Sartre’s own literary “life” exemplifies trends he thematized in both Words and Being and Nothingness , summed up by his claim that “to be dead is to be prey for the living” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]). Sartre himself was one of the first to undertake such an autobiographical effort, via his evocation of his own childhood in Words (1964a)—in which Sartre applies to himself his method of existential psychoanalysis, thereby complicating this life/death binary.

Like many of his generation, Sartre lived through a series of major cultural and historical events that his existential philosophy responded to and attempted to shape. He was born in 1905 and died in 1980, spanning most of the twentieth century and the trajectory that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the “age of extremes”, a period that was also well-described in the middle of that century in Albert Camus’ The Rebel , notwithstanding that the reception of Camus’ book in Les Temps Modernes in 1951–2 caused Sartre and Camus to very publicly fall out.

The major events of Sartre’s life seem relatively clear, at least viewed from an external perspective. A child throughout World War 1, he was a young man during the Great Depression but born into relative affluence, brought up by his grandmother. At least as presented in Word s, Sartre’s childhood was filled with books, the dream of posterity and immortality in those books, and in which he grappled with his loss of the use of one eye and encountered the realities of his own appearance revealed through his mother’s look after a haircut—suffice to say, he was not classically beautiful.

Sartre’s education, by contrast, was classical—the École Normale Supérieure. His education at the ENS was oriented around the history of philosophy, and the influential bifurcation of that time between the neo-Kantianism of Brunschvicg and the vitalism of Bergson. While Sartre failed his first attempt at the aggregation, apparently by virtue of being overly ambitious, on repeating the year he topped the class (de Beauvoir was second, at her first attempt and at the age of 21, then the youngest to complete). Sartre then taught philosophy at various schools, notably at Le Havre from 1931–36 and while he was composing his early philosophy and his great philosophical novel, Nausea . He never entered a classical university position.

Although Sartre’s philosophical encounter with phenomenology had already occurred (around 1933), which de Beauvoir described as causing him to turn pale with emotion (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 112]), with the onset of World War 2 Sartre merged those philosophical concerns with more obviously existential themes like freedom, authenticity, responsibility, and anguish, as translated into English from the French angoisse by both Hazel Barnes and Sarah Richmond. He was a Meteorologist in Alsace in the war and was captured by the German Army in 1940 and imprisoned for just under a year (see War Diaries ). During this socio-political turmoil, Sartre remained remarkably prolific. Notable publications include his play, No Exit (1947), Being and Nothingness (1943), and then completing Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Anti-semite and Jew (1946), and founding and coediting Les Temps Modernes , commencing from 1943 (Sartre’s major contributions are collected in his series Situations , especially volume V).

Sartre continued to lead various social and political protests after that period, especially concerning French colonialism (see section 7 below). By the time of the student revolutions in May 1968 he was no longer quite the dominant cultural and intellectual force he had been, but he did not retreat from public life and engagement and died in 1980. Estimates of the numbers of those attending his funeral procession in Paris range from 50–100,000 people. Sartre had been in the midst of a collaboration with Benny Levy regarding ethics, the so-called “Hope Now” interviews, whose status remain somewhat controversial in Sartrean scholarship, given the interviews were produced in the midst of Sartre’s illness and shortly before he died, and the fact that the relevant audio-recordings are not publicly available.

One of the most famous foundational moments of existentialism concerns Sartre’s discovery of phenomenology around the turn of 1932/3, when in a Parisian bar listening to his friend Raymond Aron’s description of an apricot cocktail (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 135]). From this moment, Sartre was fascinated by the originality and novelty of Husserl’s method, which he identified straight away as a means to fulfil his own philosophical expectations: overcoming the opposition between idealism and realism; getting a view on the world that would allow him “to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process”. Sartre became immediately acquainted with Emmanuel Levinas’s early translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and his introductory book on Husserl’s theory of intuition. He spent the following year in Berlin, so as to study more closely Husserl’s method and to familiarise himself with the works of his students, Heidegger and Scheler. With Levinas, and then later with Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Tran Duc Thao, Sartre became one of the first serious interpreters and proponent of Husserl’s phenomenology in France.

While he was studying in Berlin, Sartre tried to convert his study of Husserl into an article that documents his enthusiastic discovery of intentionality. It was published a few years later under the title “Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology”. This article, which had considerable influence over the early French reception of phenomenology, makes explicit the reasons Sartre had to be fascinated by Husserl’s descriptive approach to consciousness, and how he managed to merge it with his previous philosophical concerns. Purposefully leaving aside the idealist aspects of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Sartre proposes a radicalisation of intentionality that stresses its anti-idealistic potential. Against the French contemporary versions of neo-Kantianism (Brochard, Lachelier), and more particularly against the kind of idealism advocated by Léon Brunschvicg, Sartre famously claims that intentionality allows us to discard the metaphysical oppositions between the inner and outer and to renounce to the very notion of the interiority of consciousness. If it is true, as Husserl states, that every consciousness is consciousness of something, and if intentionality accounts for this fundamental direction that orients consciousness towards its object and beyond itself, then, Sartre concludes, the phenomenological description of intentionality does away with the illusion that makes us responsible for the way the world appears to us. According to Sartre’s radicalised reading of Husserl’s thesis, intentionality is intrinsically realistic: it lets the world appear to consciousness as it really is , and not as a mere correlate of an intellectual act. This realistic interpretation, being perfectly in tune with Sartre’s lifelong ambition to provide a philosophical account of the contingency of being—its non-negotiable lack of necessity—convinced him to adopt Husserl’s method of phenomenological description.

While he was still in Berlin, Sartre also began to work on a more personal essay, which a few years later resulted in his first significant philosophical contribution, Transcendence of the Ego . With this influential essay Sartre engages in a much more critical way with the conception of the “transcendental ego” presented in Husserl’s Ideas and defends his realistic interpretation of intentionality against the idealistic tendencies of Husserl’s own phenomenology after the publication of Logical Investigations . Stressing the irreducible transparency of intentional experience—its fundamental orientation beyond itself towards its object, whatever this object may be—Sartre distinguishes between the dimensions of our subjective experiences that are pre-reflectively lived through, and the reflective stance thanks to which one can always make their experience the intentional object towards which consciousness is oriented. One of Sartre’s most fundamental claims in Transcendence of the Ego is that these two forms of consciousness cannot and must not be mistaken with one another: reflexive consciousness is a form of intentional consciousness that takes one’s own lived-experiences as its specific object, whereas pre-reflexive consciousness need not involve the intentional distance to the object that the act of reflection entails. In regard to self-consciousness, Sartre argues there is an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, as well as reflective forms of self-consciousness. The latter is unable to give access to oneself as the subject of unreflected consciousness, but only as the intentional object of the act of reflection, i.e., the Ego in Sartre’s terminology. The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world . It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).

This critique of the transcendental Ego is less opposed to Husserl than it may seem, notwithstanding Sartre’s reservations about the transcendental radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology. The neo-Humean claim that the “I” or Ego is nowhere to be found “within” ourselves remains faithful to the 5th Logical Investigation , in which Husserl had initially followed the very same line of reasoning (see Husserl 1901 [2001: vol. 2, 91–93]), before developing a transcendental methodology that substantially modified his approach to subjectivity (as exposed in particular in Husserl 1913 [1983]). However, for the Husserl of the Ideas Pertaining to a Phenomenology (published in 1913), the sense in which a perceptual object, which is necessarily seen from one side but also presented to us as a unified object (involving other unseen sides), requires that there be a unifying structure within consciousness itself: the transcendental ego. Sartre argues that such an account would entail that the perception of an object would always also involve an intermediary perception—such as some kind of perception or consciousness of the transcendental ego—thus threatening to disrupt the “transparency” or “translucidity” of consciousness. All forms of perception and consciousness would involve (at least) these two components, and there would be an opaqueness to consciousness that is not phenomenologically apparent. In addition, it appears that Husserl’s transcendental ego would have to pre-exist all of our particular actions and perceptions, which is something that the existentialist dictum “existence precedes essence”, which we will explicate shortly, seems committed to denying. Without considering here the extent to which Husserl can be defended against these charges, Sartre’s general claim is that the notion of a self or ego is not given in experience. Rather, it is something that is not immanent but transcendent to pre-reflective experience. The Ego is the transcendent object of one’s reflexive experience, and not the subject of the pre-reflective experience that was initially lived (but not known).

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me . The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides , so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “ the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken ”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone ). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences. In a different example of this, Sartre argues that when I perceive Pierre as loathsome, say, I do not perceive my feeling of hatred; rather, Pierre repulses me and I experience him as repulsive (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13]). Repulsiveness constitutes an essential feature of his distinctive mode of appearing, rather than a trait of my feelings towards him. Sartre concludes that reflective statements about one’s Ego cannot be logically derived from non-reflective (“ irréfléchies ”) lived-experiences:

Thus to say “I hate” or “I love” on the occasion of a singular consciousness of attraction or repulsion, is to carry out a veritable passage to the infinite […] Nothing more is needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it is certain that Pierre repulses me, yet it is and will remain forever doubtful that I hate him. Indeed, this affirmation infinitely exceeds the power of reflection. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13])

This critique of the powers of reflection forms one important part of Sartre’s argument for the primacy of pre-reflective consciousness over reflective consciousness, which is central to many of the pivotal arguments of Being and Nothingness , as we indicate in the relevant sections below.

For many of his readers, the book on the Imaginary that Sartre published in 1940 constitutes one of the most rigorous and fruitful developments of his Husserl-inspired phenomenological investigations. Along with the The Emotions: Outline of a Theory which was published one year before (Sartre 1939b), Sartre presented this study of imagination as an essay in phenomenological psychology, which drew on his lifetime interest in psychological studies and brought to completion the research on imagination he had undertaken since the very beginning of his philosophical career. With this new essay, Sartre continues to explore the relationship between intentional consciousness and reality by focusing upon the specific case of the intentional relations to the unreal and the fictional, so as to produce an in-depth analysis of “the great ‘irrealizing’ function of consciousness”. Engaging in a detailed discussion with recent psychological research that Sartre juxtaposes with (and against) fine-grained phenomenological descriptions of the structures of imagination, his essay proposes his own theory of the imaginary as the corollary of a specific intentional attitude that orients consciousness towards the unreal.

In a similar fashion to his analysis of the world-shaping powers of emotions (Sartre 1939b), Sartre describes and highlights how imagination presents us with a coherent world, although made of objects that do not precede but result from the imaging capacities of consciousness. “The object as imaged, Sartre claims, is never anything more than the consciousness one has of it” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 15]). Contrary to other modes of consciousness such as perception or memory, which connect us to a world that is essentially one and the same, the objects to which imaginative consciousness connects us belong to imaginary worlds, which may not only be extremely diverse, but also follow their own rules, having their own spatiality and temporality. The island of Thrinacia where Odysseus lands on his way back to Ithaca needs not be located anywhere on our maps nor have existed at a specific time: its mode of existence is that of a fictional object, which possesses its own spatiality and temporality within the imaginary world it belongs to.

Sartre stresses that the intentional dimension of imaging consciousness is essentially characterised by its negativity. The negative act, Sartre writes, is “constitutive of the image” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 183]): an image consciousness is a consciousness of something that is not , whether its object is absent, non-existing, or fictional. When we picture Odysseus sailing back to his native island, Odysseus is given to us “as absent to intuition”. In this sense, Sartre concludes,

one can say that the image has wrapped within it a certain nothingness. […] However lively, appealing, strong the image, it gives its object as not being. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 14])

The irrealizing function of imagination results from this immediate consciousness of the nothingness of its object. Sartre’s essay investigates how imaging consciousness allows us to operate with its objects as if they were present, even though these very objects are given to us as non-existing or absent. This is for instance what happens when we go to the theatre or read a novel:

To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors, the forest of As You Like It on the cardboard trees. To read is to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs. In this world there are plants, animals, fields, towns, people: initially those mentioned in the book and then a host of others that are not named but are in the background and give this world its depth. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 64])

The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the spectator or reader from projecting herself into this world as if it was real . The acts of imagination can consequently be described as “magical acts” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 125]), similar to incantations with respect to the way they operate, since they are designed to make the object of one’s thought or desire appear in such a way that one can take possession of it.

In the conclusion of his essay, Sartre stresses the philosophical significance of the relationship between imagination and freedom, which are both necessarily involved in our relationship to the world. Imagination, Sartre writes, “is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 186]). Imaging consciousness posits its object as “out of reach” in relation to the world understood as the synthetic totality within which consciousness situates itself. For Sartre, the imaginary creation is only possible if consciousness is not placed “in-the-midst-of-the-world” as one existent among others.

For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 184])

In that respect, the irrealizing function of imagination allows consciousness to “surpass the real” so as to constitute it as a proper world : “the nihilation of the real is always implied by its constitution as a world”. This capacity of surpassing the real to make it a proper world defines the very notion of “situation” that becomes central in Sartre’s philosophical thought after the publication of the Imaginary . Situations are nothing but “the different immediate modes of apprehension of the real as a world” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185]). Consciousness’ situation-in-the-world is precisely that which motivates the constitution of any irreal object and accounts for the creation of imaginary worlds—for instance, and perhaps above all, in art:

Every apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to end up with the production of irreal objects since it is always, in a sense, free nihilation of the world and this always from a particular point of view. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185])

With this conclusion, which prioritises the question of the world over that of reality, Sartre begins to move away from the realist perspective he was initially aiming at when he first discovered phenomenology, so as to make the phenomenological investigation of our “being-in-the-world” (influenced by his careful rereading of Heidegger in the late 30s) his new priority.

Although Sartre never stated it explicitly, his interest in the question of the unreal and imaging consciousness appears to be intimately connected with his general conception of literature and his self-understanding of his own literary production. The concluding remarks of the Imaginary extend the scope of Sartre’s phenomenological analyses of the irrealizing powers of imagination, by applying them to the domain of aesthetics so as to answer the question about the ontological status of works of art. For Sartre, any product of artistic creation—a novel, a painting, a piece of music, or a theatre play—is just as irreal an object as the imaginary world it gives rise to. The irreality of the work of art allows us to experience—though only imaginatively—the world it gives flesh to as an “analogon” of reality. Even a cubist painting, which might not depict nor represent anything, still functions as an analogon, which manifests

an irreal ensemble of new things , of objects that I have never seen nor will ever see but that are nonetheless irreal objects. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 191])

Likewise, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irreal objects through verbal analogons.

This original conception of the nature of the work of art dominates Sartre’s critical approach to literature in the many essays he dedicates to the art of the novel. This includes his critical analyses of recent writers’ novels in the 30s—Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Mauriac, etc.—and the publication in the late 40s of his own summative view, What is literature? (Sartre 1948a [1988]). In a series of articles gathered in the first volume of his Situations (1947, Sit. I ), Sartre defends a strong version of literary realism that can, somewhat paradoxically, be read as a consequence of his theory of the irreality of the work of art. If imagination projects the spectator within the imaginary world created by the artist, then the success of the artistic process is proportional to the capacity of the artwork to let the spectator experience it as a reality of its own, giving rise to a full-fledged world. Sartre applies in particular this analysis to novels, which must aim, according to him, at immersing the reader within the fictional world they depict so as to make her experience the events and adventures of the characters as if she was living them in first person. The complete absorption of the reader within the imaginary world created by the novelist must ultimately recreate the particular feel of reality that defines Sartre’s phenomenological kind of literary realism (Renaudie 2017), which became highly influential over the following decades in French literature. The reader must be able to experience the actions of the characters of the novel as if they did not result from the imagination of the novelist, but proceeded from the character’s own freedom—and Sartre goes as far as to claim that this radical “spellbinding” (“envoûtante”, Sartre 1940 [2004: 175])) quality of literary fiction defines the touchstone of the art of the novel (See “François Mauriac and Freedom”, in Sartre Sit. I ).

This original version of literary realism is intrinsically tied to the question of freedom, and opposed to the idea according to which realist literature is expected to provide a mere description of reality as it is . In What is Literature? , Sartre describes the task of the novelist as that of disclosing the world as if it arose from human freedom—rather than from a deterministic chain of causes and consequences. The author’s art consists in obliging her reader “to create what [she] discloses ”, and so to share with the writer the responsibility and freedom involved in the act of literary creation (Sartre 1948a [1988: 61]). In order for the world of the novel to offer its maximum density,

the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be.

The conception of the writer’s engagement that resulted from these analyses constitutes probably the most well-known aspect of Sartre’s relation to literature. The writer only has one topic: freedom.

This analysis of the role of imaginative creations of art can also help us to understand the role of philosophy within his own novels, particularly in Nausea , a novel which Sartre began as he was studying Husserl in Berlin. In this novel Sartre’s pre-phenomenological interest for the irreducibility of contingency intersects with his newly-acquired competences in phenomenological analyses, making Nausea a beautifully illustrated expression of the metaphysical register Sartre gave to Husserl’s conception of intentionality. The feeling of nausea that Roquentin, the main character of Sartre’s novel, famously experienced in a public garden while obsessively watching a chestnut tree, accounts for his sensitivity to the absolute lack of necessity of whatever exists. Sartre understands this radical absence of necessity as the expression of the fundamental contingency of being. Roquentin’s traumatic moment of realisation that there is absolutely no reason for the existence of all that exists illustrates the intuition that motivated Sartre’s philosophical thinking since the very beginning of his intellectual career as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as Simone de Beauvoir recalls (1981 [1986]). It constitutes the metaphysical background of his interpretation of intentionality, which he would come to develop and systematise in the early dense parts of Being and Nothingness . While the experience of nausea when confronting the contingency of the chestnut tree does not give us conceptual knowledge, it involves a form of non-conceptual ontological awareness that is of a fundamentally different order to, and cannot be derived from, our conceptual understanding and knowledge of brute existence.

4. Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943) remains the defining treatise of the existentialist “movement”, along with works from de Beauvoir from this period (e.g., The Ethics of Ambiguity ). We cannot do justice to the entirety of the book here, but we can indicate the broad outlines of the position. In brief, Sartre provides a series of arguments for the necessary freedom of “human reality” (his gloss on Heidegger’s conception of Dasein), based upon an ontological distinction between what he calls being-for-itself ( pour soi ) and being-in-itself ( en soi ), roughly between that which negates and transcends (consciousness) and the "pure plenitude" of objects. That kind of metaphysical position might seem to “beg the question” by assuming what it purports to establish (i.e., radical human freedom). However, Sartre argues that realism and idealism cannot sufficiently account for a wide range of phenomena associated with negation. He also draws on the direct evidence of phenomenological experience (i.e., the experience of anguish). But the argument for his metaphysical picture and human freedom is, on balance, an inference to the best explanation. He contends that his complex metaphysical vision best captures and explains central aspects of human reality.

As the title of the book suggests, nothingness plays a significant role. While Sartre’s concern with nothingness might be a deal-breaker for some, following Rudolph Carnap’s trenchant criticisms of Heidegger’s idea that the “nothing noths/nothings” (depending on translation from the German), Sartre’s account of negation and nothingness (the latter of which is the ostensible ground of the former) is nevertheless philosophically interesting. Sartre does not say much about the genesis of consciousness or the for-itself, other than that it is contingent and arises from “the effort of an in-itself to found itself” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 84]). He describes the appearance of the for-itself as the absolute event, which occurs through being’s attempt “to remove contingency from its being”. Accordingly, the for-itself is radically and inescapably distinct from the in-itself. In particular, it functions primarily through negation, whether in relation to objects, values, meaning, or social facts. According to Sartre this negation is not about any reflective judgement or cognition, but an ontological relation to the world. This ontological interpretation of negation minimises the subjectivist interpretations of his philosophy. The most vivid example he provides to illustrate this pre-reflective negation is the apprehension of Pierre’s absence from a café. Sartre describes Pierre’s absence as pervading the whole café. The café is cast in the metaphorical “shade” of Pierre not being there at the time he had been expected. This experience depends on human expectations, of course. But Sartre argues that if, by contrast, we imagine or reflect that someone else is not present (say the Duke of Wellington, an elephant, etc.), these abstract negative facts are not existentially given in the same manner as our pre-reflective encounter with Pierre’s absence. They are not given as an “objective fact”, as a “component of the real”.

Sartre provides numerous other examples of pre-reflective negation throughout Being and Nothingness . He argues that the apprehension of fragility and destruction are likewise premised on negativity, and any effort to adequately describe these phenomena requires negative concepts, but also that they presuppose more than just negative thoughts and judgements. In regard to destruction, Sartre suggests that there is not less after the storm, just something else (Sartre 1943 [1956: 8]). Generally, we do not need to reflectively judge that a building has been destroyed, but directly see it in terms of that which it is not —the building, say, in its former glory before being wrecked by the storm. Humans introduce the possibility of destruction and fragility into the world, since objectively there is just a change. Sartre’s basic question is: how could we accomplish this unless we are a being by whom nothingness comes into the world, i.e., free? He poses similar arguments in regard to a range of phenomena that present as basic to our modes of inhabiting the world, from bad faith through to anguish. In all of these cases Sartre argues that while we can expressly pose negative judgements, or deliberately ask questions that admit of the possibility of negative reply, or consciously individuate and distinguish objects by reference to the objects which they are not, there is a pre-comprehension of non-being that is the condition of such negative judgements.

Although the for-itself and the in-itself are initially defined very abstractly, the book ultimately comes to say a lot more about the for-itself, even if not much more about the in-itself. The picture of the for-itself and its freedom gradually becomes more “concrete”, reflecting the architectonic of the text, which has more sustained treatments of the body, others, and action, in the second half. Throughout, Sartre gives a series of paradoxical glosses on the nature of the for-itself—i.e., a “being which is what it is not and is not what it is” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 79]). Although this might appear to be a contradiction, Sartre’s claim is that it is the fundamental mode of existence of the for-itself that is future-oriented and does not have a stable identity in the manner of a chair, say, or a pen-knife. Rather, “existence precedes essence”, as he famously remarks in both Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In later chapters he develops the basic ontological position in regard to free action. His point is not, of course, to say we are free to do or achieve anything (freedom as power), or even to claim that we are free to “project” anything at all. The for-itself is always in a factical situation. Nonetheless, he asserts that the combination of the motives and ends we aspire to in relation to that facticity depend on an act of negation in relation to the given. As he puts it: “Action necessarily implies as its condition the recognition of a “desideratum”; that is, of an objective lack or again of a negatité” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 433]). Even suffering in-itself is not a sufficient motive to determine particular acts. Rather, it is the apprehension of the revolution as possible (and as desired) which gives to the worker’s suffering its value as motive (Sartre 1943 [1956: 437]). A factual state, even poverty, does not determine consciousness to apprehend it as a lack. No factual state, whatever it may be, can cause consciousness to respond to it in any one way. Rather, we make a choice (usually pre-reflective) about the significance of that factual state for us, and the ends and motives that we adopt in relation to it. We are “condemned” to freedom of this ontological sort, with resulting anguish and responsibility for our individual situation, as well as for more collective situations of racism, oppression, and colonialism. These are the themes for which Sartre became famous, especially after World War 2 and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In Being and Nothingness he provides various examples that are designed to make this quite radical philosophy of freedom plausible, including the hiker who gives in to their fatigue and collapses to the ground. Sartre says that a necessary condition for the hiker to give in to their fatigue—short of fainting—is that their fatigue goes from being experienced as simply part of the background to their activity, with their direct conscious attention focusing on something else (e.g., the scenery, the challenge, competing with a friend, philosophising, etc.), to being the direct focus of their attention and thus becoming a motive for direct recognition of one’s exhaustion and the potential action of collapsing to the ground. Although we are not necessarily reflectively aware of having made such a decision, things could have been otherwise and thus Sartre contends we have made a choice. Despite appearances, however, Sartre insists that his view is not a voluntarist or capricious account of freedom, but one that necessarily involves a situation and a context. His account of situated freedom in the chapter “Freedom and Action” affirms the inability to extricate intentions, ends, motives, and reasons, from the embodied context of the actor. As a synthetic whole, it is not merely freedom of intention or motive (and hence even consciousness) that Sartre affirms. Rather, our freedom is realised only in its projections and actions, and is nothing without such action.

Sartre’s account of bad faith ( mauvaise foi ) is of major interest. It is said to be a phenomenon distinctive of the for-itself, thus warranting ontological treatment. It also feeds into questions to do with self-knowledge (see Moran 2001), as well as serving as the basis for some of his criticisms of racism and colonialism in his later work. His account of bad faith juxtaposes a critique of Freud with its own “depth” interpretive account, “existential psychoanalysis”, which is itself indebted to Freud, as Sartre admits.

We will start with Sartre’s critique of Freud, which is both simple and complex, and features in the early parts of the chapter on bad faith in Being and Nothingness . In short, Freud’s differing meta-psychological pictures (Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious, or Id, Ego, Superego) are charged with splitting the subject in two (or more) in attempting to provide a mechanistic explanation of bad faith: that is, how there can be a “liar” and a “lied to” duality within a single consciousness. But Sartre accuses Freud of reifying this structure, and rather than adequately explaining the problem of bad faith, he argues that Freud simply transfers the problem to another level where it remains unsolved, thus consisting in a pseudo-explanation (which today might be called a “homuncular fallacy”). Rather than the problem being something that pertains to an embodied subject, and how they might both be aware of something and yet also repress it at the same time, Sartre argues that the early Freudian meta-psychological model transfers the seat of this paradox to the censor: that is, to a functional part of the brain/mind that both knows and does not know. It must know enough in order to efficiently repress, but it also must not know too much or nothing is hidden and the problematic truth is manifest directly to consciousness. Freud’s “explanation” is hence accused of recapitulating the problem of bad faith in an ostensible mechanism that is itself “conscious” in some paradoxical sense. Sartre even provocatively suggests that the practice of psychoanalysis is itself in bad faith, since it treats a part of ourselves as “Id”-like and thereby denies responsibility for it. That is not the end of Sartre’s story, however, because he ultimately wants to revive a version of psychoanalysis that does not pivot around the “unconscious” and these compartmentalised models of the mind. We will come back to that, but it is first necessary to introduce Sartre’s own positive account of bad faith.

While bad faith is inevitable in Sartre’s view, it is also important to recognise that the “germ of its destruction” lies within. This is because bad faith always remains at least partly available to us in our own lived-experience, albeit not in a manner that might be given propositional form in the same way as knowledge of an external object. In short, when I existentially comprehend that my life is dissatisfying, or even reflect on this basis that I have lived an inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (it is given differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie and more likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictly equivalent or identical with the “I” that is claimed to be in bad faith (cf. Moran 2001). There is a distanciation involved in coming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformation of a more practical kind, even if this is under-thematised in Being and Nothingness .

Sartre gives many examples of bad faith that remain of interest. His most famous example of bad faith is the café waiter who plays at being a café waiter, and who attempts to institutionalise themselves as this object. While Sartre’s implied criticisms of their manner of inhabiting the world might seem to disparage social roles and affirm an individualism, arguably this is not a fair reading of the details of the text. For Sartre we do have a factical situation, but the claim is that we cannot be wholly reduced to it. As Sartre puts it:

There is no doubt I am in a sense a café waiter—otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or reporter? But if I am one, this cannot be in the mode of being-in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not . (Sartre 1943 [1956: 60])

In subsequent work, racism becomes emblematic of bad faith, when we reduce the other to some ostensible identity (e.g., Anti-semite and the Jew ).

It is important to recognise that no project of “sincerity”, if that is understood as strictly being what one is, is possible for Sartre given his view of the for-itself. Likewise, in regard to any substantive self-knowledge that might be achieved through direct self-consciousness, our options are limited. On Sartre’s view we cannot look inwards and discover the truth about our identity or our own bad faith through simple introspection (there is literally no-thing to observe). Moreover, when we have a lived experience, and then reflect on ourselves from outside (e.g., third-personally), we are not strictly reducible to that Ego that is so posited. We transcend it. Or, to be more precise, we both are that Ego (just as we are what the Other perceives) and yet are also not reducible to it. This is due to the structure of consciousness and the arguments from Transcendence of the Ego examined in section 2 . In Being and Nothingness , the temporal aspects of this non-coincidence are also emphasised. We are not just our past and our objective attributes in accord with some sort of principle of identity, because we are also our “projects”, and these are intrinsically future oriented.

Nonetheless, Sartre argues that it would be false to conclude that all modes of inhabiting the world are thereby equivalent in terms of “faith” and “bad faith”. Rather, there are what he calls “patterns of bad faith” and he says these are “objective”. Any conduct can be seen from two perspectives—transcendence and facticity, being-for-itself and being-for-others. But it is the exclusive affirmation of one or the others of these (or a motivated and selective oscillation between them) which constitutes bad faith. There is no direct account of good faith in Being and Nothingness , other than the enigmatic footnote at the end of the book that promises an ethics. There are more sustained treatments of authenticity in his Notebooks for an Ethics and in Anti-semite and Jew (see also the entry on authenticity ).

Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity is often the subject of premature dismissal. The hyperbolic dimension of his writings on the Look of the Other and the pessimism of his chapter on “concrete relations with others”, which is essentially a restatement of the “master-slave” stage of Hegel’s struggle for recognition without the possibility of its overcoming, are sometimes treated as if they were nothing but the product of a certain sort of mind—a kind of adolescent paranoia or hysteria about the Other (see, e.g., Marcuse 1948). What this has meant, however, is that the significance of Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity, both within phenomenological circles and more broadly in regard to philosophy of mind and social cognition, has been downplayed. Building on the insights of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre proposes a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for any theory of the other, which are far from trivial. In Being and Nothingness , Sartre suggests that various philosophical positions—realism and idealism, and beyond—have been shipwrecked, often unawares, on what he calls the “reef of solipsism”. His own solution to the problem of other minds consists, first and foremost, in his descriptions of being subject to the look of another, and the way in which in such an experience we become a “transcendence transcended”. On his famous description, we are asked to imagine that we are peeping through a keyhole, pre-reflectively immersed and absorbed in the scene on the other side of the door. Maybe we would be nervous engaging in such activities given the socio-cultural associations of being a “Peeping Tom”, but after a period of time we would be given over to the scene with self-reflection and self-awareness limited to merely the minimal (tacit or “non-thetic” in Sartre’s language) understanding that we are not what we are perceiving. Suddenly, though, we hear footsteps, and we have an involuntary apprehension of ourselves as an object in the eyes of another; a “pre-moral” experience of shame; a shudder of recognition that we are the object that the other sees, without room for any sort of inferential theorising or cognising (at least that is manifest to our own consciousness). This ontological shift, Sartre says, has another person as its condition, notwithstanding whether or not one is in error on a particular occasion of such an experience (i.e., the floor creaks but there is no-one actually literally present). While many other phenomenological accounts emphasise empathy or direct perception of mental states (for example, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty), Sartre thereby adds something significant and distinctive to these accounts that focus on our experience of the other person as an object (albeit of a special kind) rather than as a subject. In common with other phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Scheler, Sartre also maintains that it is a mistake to view our relations with the other as one characterised by a radical separation that we can only bridge with inferential reasoning. Any argument by analogy, either to establish the existence of others in general or to particular mental states like anger, is problematic, begging the question and having insufficient warrant.

For Sartre, at least in his early work, our experience of being what he calls a “we subject”—as a co-spectator in a lecture or concert for example, which involves no objectification of the other people we are with—is said to be merely a subjective and psychological phenomenon that does not ground our understanding and knowledge of others ontologically (Sartre 1943 [1956: 413–5]). Originally, human relations are typified by dyadic mode of conflict best captured in the look of the other, and the sort of scenario concerning the key-hole we just considered above. Given that we also do not grasp a plural look, for Sartre, this means that social life is fundamentally an attempt to control the impact of the look upon us, either by anticipating it in advance and attempting to invalidate that perspective (sadism) or by anticipating it and attempting to embrace that solicited perspective when it comes (masochism). In Sartre’s words:

It is useless for human reality to seek to escape this dilemma: one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relations between consciousness is not the Mitsein (being-with); it is conflict. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 429])

Sartre’s radical criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not his last word on psychoanalysis. In the last chapters of Being and Nothingness , Sartre presents his own conception of an existential psychoanalysis, drawing on some insights from his attempt to account for Emperor Wilhelm II as a “human-reality” in the 14 th notebook from his War Diaries (Sartre 1983b [1984]). This existential version of psychoanalysis is claimed to be compatible with Sartre’s rejection of the unconscious, and is expected to achieve a “psychoanalysis of consciousness” (Moati 2020: 219), allowing us to understand one’s existence in light of their fundamental free choice of themselves.

The very idea of a psychoanalysis oriented towards the study of consciousness rather than the unconscious seems paradoxical—a paradox increased by Sartre’s efforts to highlight the fundamental differences that oppose his own version of psychoanalysis to Freud’s. Sartre contends that Freud’s “empirical” psychoanalysis

is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche, which on principle escapes the intuition of the subject.

By contrast, Sartre’s own existential psychoanalysis aims to remain faithful to one of the earliest claims of Husserl’s phenomenology: that all psychic acts are “coextensive with consciousness” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570]). For Sartre, however, the basic motivation for rejecting Freud’s hypothesis is less an inheritance of Brentano’s descriptive psychology (as was the case for Husserl) than a consequence of Sartre’s fundamental critique of determinism, applied to the naturalist presuppositions of empirical psychoanalysis and the particular kind of determinism that it involves. In agreement with Freud, Sartre holds that psychic life remains inevitably “opaque” and at least somewhat impenetrable to us. He also stresses that the philosophical understanding of human reality requires a method for investigating the meaning of psychic facts. But Sartre denies that the methods and causal laws of the natural sciences are of any help in that respect. The human psyche cannot be fully analysed and explained as a mere result of external constraints acting like physical forces or natural causes. The for-itself, being always what it is not and not what it is, remains free whatever the external and social constraints. Sartre is consequently bound to reject any emphasis on the causal impact of the past upon the present, which he argues is the basic methodological framework of empirical psychoanalysis. That does not mean that past psychic or physical facts have no impact on one’s existence whatsoever. Rather, Sartre contends that the impact of past events is determined in relation to one’s present choice, and understood as the consequence of the power invested in this free choice. As he puts it:

Since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free, reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has given itself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power of a past. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 503])

Past events bear no other meaning than the one given by a subject, in agreement with the free project that orients his or her existence towards the future. Conversely, determinist explanations that construe one’s present as a mere consequence of the past proceed from a kind of self-delusion that operates by concealing one’s free project, and thus contributes to the obliteration of responsibility. Sartre hence seeks to redefine the scope of psychoanalysis: rather than a proper explanation of human behaviour that relies on the identification of the laws of its causation, psychoanalysis consists in understanding the meaning of our conducts in light of one’s project of existence and free choice. One might wonder, then, why we need any such psychoanalysis, if the existential project that constitutes its object is freely chosen by the subject. Sartre addresses this objection in Being and Nothingness , claiming that

if the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject and hence wholly conscious, that certainly does not mean that it must by the same token be known by him; quite the contrary. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570])

What Freud calls the unconscious must be redescribed as the paradoxical entanglement of a “total absence of knowledge” combined with a “true understanding” ( réelle comprehension ) of oneself (1972, Sit. IX : 111). The legitimacy of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis of consciousness lies in its ability to unveil the original project according to which one chooses (more or less obscurely) to develop the fundamental orientations of their existence. According to Sartre, analysing a human subject and understanding the meaning that orients their existence as a whole requires that we grasp the specific kind of unity that lies behind their various attitudes and conducts. This unity can only appear once we discover the synthetic principle of unification or “totalization” ( totalisation ) that commands the whole of their behaviours. Sartre understands this totalization as an an-going process that covers the entire course of one’s existence, a process which is constantly reassumed so as to integrate the new developments of this existence. For this reason, this never ending process of totalization cannot be fully self-conscious or the object of reflective self-knowledge. The synthetic principle that makes this totalization possible is identified by Sartre in terms of fundamental choice: existential psychoanalysis describes human subjects as synthetic totalities in which every attitude, conduct, or behaviour finds its meaning in relation to the unity of a primary choice, which all of the subject’s behaviour expresses in its own way.

All human behaviour can thus be described as a secondary particularisation of a fundamental project which expresses the subject’s free choice, and conditions the intelligibility of their actions. On the basis of his diagnosis of Baudelaire’s existential project, for instance, Sartre goes as far as to claim that he is “prepared to wager that he preferred meats cooked in sauces to grills, preserves to fresh vegetables” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 113]). Sartre legitimates such a daring statement by showing its logical connection to Baudelaire’s irresistible hatred for nature, from which his gastronomic preferences must derive, and which Sartre identifies as the expression of the initial free choice of himself that commands the whole of the French poète maudit ’s existence. In Sartre’s words:

He chose to exist for himself as he was for others. He wanted his freedom to appear to himself like a “nature”; and he wanted this “nature” which others discovered in him to appear to them like the very emanation of his freedom. From that point everything becomes clear. […] We should look in vain for a single circumstance for which he was not fully and consciously responsible. Every event was a reflection of that indecomposable totality which he was from the first to the last day of his life (Sartre 1947a [1967: 191–192]).

Baudelaire’s choice of himself both accounts for the subject’s freedom (insofar as it has been freely accepted as the subject’s own project of existence) and exerts a constraint on particular behaviours and attitudes towards the world, so that he is bound to act and behave in a way that must be compatible with that choice. Although absolutely free, such an initial choice takes the shape and the meaning of an inescapable and relentless destiny —a destiny in which one’s sense of freedom and their inability to act in any other way than they actually did come to merge perfectly: “the free choice which a man makes of himself is completely identified with what is called his destiny” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 192]).

In the years following the publication of Being and Nothingness , Sartre refines this original conception of existential psychoanalysis. He applies it methodically to the biographical analysis of a series of major French writers (Baudelaire first, then Mallarmé, Jean Genêt, Flaubert, and himself in Words ), warning against the dangers of all kinds of determinist interpretations, from the constitution of psychological types to materialist explanations inherited from Marxian historical analyses. Sartre’s analyses become more subtle over time, as he substitutes fine-grained descriptions of the concrete constraints that frame and shape the limits of human lives to the strongly metaphysical theses on freedom that he was first tempted to apply indistinctly to each of these writers. Accordingly, existential psychoanalysis plays a central role in the development of Sartre’s thought from the early 40s up to his last published work on Flaubert. It allows him to unify and articulate two fundamental threads of his philosophical thinking: his ontological analysis of the absolute freedom of the for-itself in Being and Nothingness ; and his later attempt to take into consideration the social, historical and political factors that are inevitably involved in the determination of one’s free choice of their own existence. Already in his War Diaries from 1940, the method of analysis of “human reality” arises from Sartre’s attempt to understand rather than explain (according to Dilthey’s famous distinction) Emperor Wilhelm II’s historical situation and its relation to the aspects of his personal life that express his specific way of being-in-the-world (Sartre 1983b [1984: 308–309]). The application of his method to the specific cases of these French writers allowed him to refine the ahistorical descriptions of his earlier work, by bringing the analysis of the subject’s freedom back to the material/historical conditions (both internal and external) of constitution of their particular modes of existing.

Sartre’s inquiries into existential psychoanalysis also anticipate and intersect with his philosophical investigations on historical anthropology. The progressive-regressive method presented in Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1960a [1976]) was first sketched and experimented through Sartre’s essays in existential psychoanalysis. Sartre’s detailed analyses of Flaubert’s biography in The Family Idiot can be read as synthesising the hermeneutical methodology theorised in Search for A Method and the conception of the freedom involved in one’s initial choice of themselves that arose from Being and Nothingness . Moving discretely away from an all-too metaphysical doctrine of absolute freedom, Sartre goes back to the most concrete details of Flaubert’s material conditions of existence in order to account for the specific way in which Flaubert made himself able, through the writing of his novels, to overcome his painful situation as a “frustrated and jealous younger brother” and “unloved child” thanks to a totalizing project that made him “the author of Madame Bovary ” (Sartre 1971–72 [1987, vol. 2: 7]). If Flaubert’s novel and masterpiece is consequently understood and described as the final objectivation of Gustave’s fundamental project, Sartre is now careful to point out the economic, historic and social conditions within which this project only finds its full intelligibility. Sartre’s psychoanalytic method is then expected to reveal, beyond what society has made of Flaubert, what he himself could make of what society has made of him. In order to fly away from the painful reality of his unbearable familial situation, the young Gustave chooses irreality over reality, and chooses it freely, though achingly. From that moment on, his dedication to literature commits him to a fictional world that he couldn’t but choose to elect as the realm of his genius.

While Search for a Method (1957) had been published earlier, it is not until 1960 that Sartre completed the first volume—“Theory of Practical Ensembles”—of what is his final systematic work of philosophy, Critique of Dialectical Reason . The second volume, “The Intelligibility of History”, was published posthumously in French in 1985. It would be 1991 before both volumes were to be available in English, which goes some of the way towards explaining their subsequent neglect. It is also a book that rivals Being and Nothingness for difficulty, even if some of its goals and ambitions can be expressed straightforwardly enough. Never a member of the French Communist Party, Sartre nonetheless begins by laying his Marxist cards on the table:

we were convinced at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 21])

Critique offers a systematic attempt to justify these two perspectives and render them compatible. In broad terms, some of the main steps needed to effect such a synthesis are clear, most notably to deny or limit strong structuralist and determinist versions of Marxism. Borrowing some themes from Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror , Sartre maintained that any genuinely dialectical method refuses to reduce; it refuses scientific and economic determinism that treats humans as things, contrary to reductive versions of Marxism. He pithily puts his objection to such explanations in terms of what we might today call the genetic fallacy. Sartre says,

Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 56])

Moreover, for Sartre, class struggle is not the only factor that determines and orients history and the field of possibilities. There is human choice and commitment in class formation that is equally fundamental. The way in which this plays out in Critique is through an emphasis on praxis rather than consciousness, which we have seen is also characteristic of his existential psychoanalytic work of the prior decade.

Without being able to adequately summarise the vast Critique here (see Flynn 1984), one of the book’s core conceptual innovations is the idea of the practico-inert. Sartre defines this as “the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 556]). The concept is intended to capture the forms of social and historical sedimentation that had only minimally featured in Being and Nothingness . It is the reign of necessity,

the domain … in which inorganic materiality envelops human multiplicity and transforms the producer into its product. (Sartre 1960a [1976: 339])

For Sartre, the practico-inert is the negation of humanity. Any reaffirmation of humanity, in which genuine freedom resides, must take the form of the negation of this negation (negation is productive here, as it also was in Being and Nothingness ). For Sartre, then, there are two fundamental kinds of social reality: a positive one in which an active group constitutes the common field; and a negative one in which individuals are effectively separated from each other (even though they appear united) in a practico-inert field. In the practico-inert field, relations are typified by what Sartre calls seriality, like a number, or a worker in a factory who is allocated to a place within a given system that is indifferent to the individual. Sartre’s prime example of this is of waiting for a bus, or street-car, on the way to work. If the people involved do not know each other reasonably well there is likely to be a kind of anonymity to such experiences in which individuals are substitutable for each other in relation to this imminent bus, and their relations are organised around functional need. If the bus is late, or if there are too many people on it, however, those who are waiting go from being indifferent and anonymous (something akin to what Heidegger calls das Man in Being and Time ) to becoming competitors and rivals. In a related spirit Sartre also discusses the serial unity of the TV watching public, of the popular music charts, bourgeois property, and petty racism and stereotyping as well. These collective objects keep serial individuals apart from one another under the pretext of unifying them. Sartre thus appears to accept a version of the Marxian theses concerning commodity fetishism. This competitive or antagonistic dimension of the practico-inert is amplified in situations of material scarcity. This kind of seriality is argued to be the basic type of sociality, thus transforming the focus on dyadic consciousnesses of Being and Nothingness . In the Critique , otherness becomes produced not simply through the look that Sartre had previously described as the original meaning of being-for-others, but through the sedimentation of social processes and through practico-inert mediation. Society produces in us serial behaviour, serial feelings, serial thoughts, and “passive activity” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 266]), where events and history are conceived as external occurrences that befall us, and we feel compelled by the force of circumstance, or “monstrous forces” as Sartre puts it. It is the practico-inert, modified by material and economic scarcity, which turns us into conflictual competitors and alienates us from each other and ourselves. Only an end to both material scarcity and the alienating mediation of the practico-inert will allow for the actualisation of socialism.

While Sartre is pessimistic about the prospects for any sort of permanent revolution of society, he maintains that we get a fleeting glimpse of this unalienated condition in the experience of the “group in fusion”. This occurs when the members of a group relate to each other through praxis and in a particular way. The group in fusion is not a collective à la the practico-inert, but a social whole that spontaneously forms as a plurality of serial individuals respond to some danger, pressing situation, or to the likelihood of a collective reaction to their stance (Flynn 1984: 114). We could consider what happens when an individual acts so as to make manifest this serial otherness, like Rosa Parkes when she refused to give up her seat and thus drew attention to the specific nature of the colonialist seriality at the heart of many states in the USA. This sometimes creates a rupture and others might follow. Sartre’s own prime example is of a crowd of workers who were fleeing during the French Revolution in 1789. At some point the workers stopped fleeing, turned around and reversed direction, suddenly energised alongside each other by their practical awareness that they were doing something together. For this kind of “fusion” to happen it must fulfil the following four key conditions for genuine reciprocity that Flynn summarises as follows:

• That the other be a means to the exact degree that I am a means myself, i.e., that he be the means towards a transcendent goal and not my means;
• That I recognize the other as praxis at the same time as I integrate him into my totalizing project;
• That I recognize his movement towards his own ends in the very movement by which I project myself towards mine;
• That I discover myself as an object and instrument of his own ends by the same act that makes him an object and instrument of mine. (Flynn 1984: 115, also see previous version of this entry [Flynn 2004 [2013]] and cf. Sartre 1960a [1976: 112–3]).

Sartre calls the resurrection of this freedom an “apocalypse”, indicating that it is an unforeseen and (potentially) revolutionary event that happens when serial abuse and exploitation can no longer be tolerated. The group in fusion has a maximum of praxis and a minimum of inertia, but serial sociality has the reverse.

Unfortunately, Sartre insists that this group in fusion is destined to meet with what he calls an “ontological check” in the form of the institution, which cannot be escaped as some versions of anarchism and Marxism might hope. The group relapses into seriality when groups are formalised into hierarchical institutional structures. Serial otherness comes to implicate itself in interpersonal relations in at least three ways in the institution: sovereignty; authority; and bureaucracy (see Book 2, Chapter 6, “The Institution”). From the co-sovereignty of the group in fusion, someone inevitably becomes sovereign in any new social order. Similarly, a command-obedience relation comes about in institutions, to greater and lesser extents, and there will be exhortations to company loyalty, to do one’s duty, etc. (Flynn 1984: 120). Bureaucratic rules and regulation also inevitably follow, partly as a reaction to fear of sovereignty, and this installs what Sartre calls vertical otherness—top-down hierarchies, as opposed to the horizontal and immanent organisation of the group in fusion (Sartre 1960a [1976: 655–663]). As such, the revolutionary force of the group in fusion is necessarily subject to mediation by the practico-inert, as well as the problems associated with institutionality just described. Although is it still structured through a series of oppositions, the Critique delivers a sophisticated social ontology that both addresses some weaknesses in Sartre’s earlier work and unifies the social and political reflections of much of his later work.

Although it is not possible to address all of Sartre’s rich and varied contributions to ethics and politics here, we will introduce some of the key ideas about race and anti-colonialism that were important themes in his post Being and Nothingness work and are currently significant issues in our times. Sartre was generally stridently anti-colonialist, perhaps even advocating a multiculturalism avant la lettre , as Michael Walzer has argued in his Preface to Anti-semite and Jew (Walzer 1995: xiv). His books and more journalistic writings typically call out what he saw as the bad faith of many French and European citizens.

The issue of race was part of Sartre’s French intellectual scene, and Sartre himself played a major role in facilitating that in the pages of Les Temps Modernes , L’Express , and elsewhere. Debates about the intersection of philosophy and race, and colonialism and multiculturalism, were all being had. These concerned not only the French Algerian and African “colonies” but also Vietnam via Tran Duc Thao, who had challenged Sartre’s efforts to bring phenomenological existentialism together with Marxism. Initially at least, Sartre’s arguments here typically drew on and extended some of the categories deployed in Being and Nothingness . There is an obvious sense in which a critique of racism automatically ensues from Sartrean existentialism. Racism is a form of bad faith, for Sartre, since it typically (perhaps necessarily) involves believing in essences or types, and indeed constructing essences and types. His Notebooks suggest that all oppression rests on bad faith. In racism, in particular, there is an “infernal circle of irresponsible responsibility, of culpable ignorance and ignorance which is knowledge” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 49]), as well as what Sartre calls passive complicity. Many of us (or Sartre’s own French society) may not obviously be bigots, but we sustain a system that is objectively unjust through our choices and sometimes wilful ignorance. In relation to colonialism, Sartre likewise contends that we have all profited from colonialist exploitation and sustained its systems, even if we are not ourselves a “settler”.

This is also the key argument of Anti-semite and the Jew , composed very quickly in 1944 and without much detailed knowledge of Judaism but with more direct knowledge of the sort of passive anti-semitism of many French citizens. The text was written following the Dreyfus affair and before all of the horrors of the holocaust were widely known. Sartre was aiming to understand (and critique) the situation he observed around him, in which the imminent return of the French Jews exiled by the Nazis was not unambiguously welcomed by all. The book is perceptive about its prime targets, the explicit or implicit anti-semite, who defines the real Frenchmen by excluding others, notably the Jew. Now, of course, few of his contemporaries would admit to being anti-semites, just as few would admit to being racist. But there are patterns of bad faith that Sartre thinks are clear: we participate in social systems that force the dilemma of authenticity or inauthenticity upon the Jew, asking them to choose between their concrete practical identities (religious and cultural) and more universal ascriptions (liberty, etc.) in a way that cannot be readily navigated within the terms of the debate. Sartre consistently ascribes responsibility to collectives here, even if those collectives are ultimately sustained by individual decisions and choices. For him, it is not just the assassin say, nor just Eichmann and the Nazi regime, who are held responsible. Rather, these more obviously egregious activities were sustained by their society and the individuals in it, through culpable ignorance and patterns of bad faith.

Sartre also addressed the negritude movement in his Preface to Black Orpheus (1948), an anthology of negritude poetry. He called for an anti-racist racism and saw himself as resolutely on the side of the negritude movement, but he also envisaged such interventions as a step towards ultimately revealing the category of race itself as an example of bad faith. Here the reception from Frantz Fanon and others was mixed. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon argues this effectively undermined his own lived-experience and its power (see entries on negritude and Fanon ; cf. also Gordon 1995). Sartre continued to address colonialism and racism in subsequent work, effecting a rapprochement of sorts with Fanon that culminated in his “Introduction” to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), where also Sartre appears to endorse a counter-violence.

Although we have not given much attention to Sartre’s literary and artistic productions since section 3 above, he continued to produce artistic work of political significance throughout his career. Continuous with insights from his What is Literature? , Sartre argues that in a society that remains unjust and dominated by oppression, the prose-writer (if not the poet) must combat this violence by jolting the reader and audience from their complacency, rather than simply be concerned with art for its own sake. His literary works hence are typically both philosophical and political. Although the number of these works diminished over time, there is still a powerful literary exploration of the philosophical and political themes of the Critique in the play, The Condemned of Altona (1960).

We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, like Sartre, to conclude. We do think, however, that it is arguable, with the benefit of hindsight, that some of Sartre’s interventions are prescient rather than outmoded remnants of the nineteenth century ( à la Foucault). They certainly presage issues that are in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. That doesn’t mean that Sartre got it all correct, of course, whatever that might mean in regard to the complex realities of socio-political life. Indeed, if one is to take a stand on so many of the major socio-political issues of one’s time, as Sartre did, it is inevitable that history will not look kindly on them all. Sartre’s life and writings hence present a complex and difficult interpretive task, but they remain a powerful provocation for thought and action today.

This bibliography presents a selection of the works from Sartre and secondary literature that are relevant for this article. For a complete annotated bibliography of Sartre’s works see

• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1974, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre , two volumes, Richard C. McCleary (trans.), (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• 1975, Magazine littéraire , 103–4: 9–49,

and by Michel Sicard in

• 1979, special issue on Sartre, Obliques , 18–19(May): 331–347.

Michel Rybalka and Michel Contat have complied an additional bibliography of primary and secondary sources published since Sartre’s death in

• Rybalka, Michel and Michel Contat, 1993, Sartre: Bibliographie 1980–1992 , (CNRS Philosophie), Paris: CNRS and Bowling Green, OH:: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University.

A.1 Works by Sartre

A.1.1 individual works published by sartre.

• 1957, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness , Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (trans.), New York: Noonday Press.
• 2004, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description , Andrew Brown (trans.), London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203694367
• 1936b [2012], L’imagination , Paris: F. Alcan. Translated as The Imagination , Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf (trans.), London: Routledge, 2012. doi:10.4324/9780203723692
• 1938 [1965], La Nausée: Roman , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Nausea , Robert Baldick (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
• 1939a [1970], “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalit”, La Nouvelle Revue française , 304: 129–132. Reprinted in Situations 1. Translated as “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, Joseph P. Fell (trans.), Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 1(2): 4–5, 1970. doi:10.1080/00071773.1970.11006118
• 1939b [1948], Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions , Paris: Hermann. Translated as The Emotions: Outline of a Theory , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
• 1940 [2004], L’Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de l’imagination , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination , Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (ed.), Jonathan Webber (trans.), London: Routledge, 2004.
• 1956, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library.
• 2018, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology , Sarah Richmond (trans.), London: Routledge.
• 1945–49, Les Chemins de la liberté (The roads to freedom), Paris: Gallimard. Series of novels L’âge de raison (The age of reason, 1945), Le sursis (The reprieve, 1945), and La mort dans l’âme (Troubled sleep, 1949).
• 1946a [2007], L’existentialisme est un humanisme , (Collection Pensées), Paris: Nagel. Translated as Existentialism is a Humanism , John Kulka (ed.), Carol Macomber (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
• 1946b [1948/1995], Réflexions sur la question juive , Paris: P. Morihien. Translated as Anti-semite and Jew , George J. Becker (trans.), New York: Schocken Books, 1948 (reprinted with preface by Michael Walzer, 1995).
• 1946c [1955], “Matérialisme et Révolution I”, Les Temps Modernes , 9: 37–63 and 10: 1–32. Reprinted in Situations III , Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Translated as , “Materialism and Revolution”, in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), New York: Criterion Books, 1955.
• 1947a [1967], Baudelaire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Baudelaire , Martin Turnell (trans.), London: H. Hamilton, 1949. Reprinted, Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1967
• 1947b [1949], Huis-Clos , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1944. Translated as No Exit , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1947c [1949], Les Mouches , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1943. Translated as The Flies , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1948a [1988], “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?”, Les Temps modernes . Collected in Situations II . Translated in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• 1948b [1967], “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi”, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie , n° 3, avril-juin 1948. Translated as “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self”, in Readings in Existential Phenomenology , Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (eds), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967.
• 1948c [1949], Les mains sales: pièce en sept tableaux , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1948. Translated as Dirty Hands , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1952a [1963], Saint-Genêt, Comédien et martyr , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1963.
• 1952b [1968]. “Les communistes et la paix”, published in Situations VI . Translated as “The Communists and Peace”, in The Communists and Peace, with A Reply to Claude Lefort , Martha H. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1968.
• 1957 [1963/1968], Questions de méthode , Paris: Gallimard. Later to be a foreword for Sartre 1960. Translated as Search for a Method , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Knopf, 1963. Reprinted New York: Random House, 1968.
• 1960a [1976], Critique de la Raison dialectique, tome 1, Théorie des ensembles pratiques , Paris, Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles , Alan Sheridan-Smith (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1976. Reprinted in 2004 with a forward by Fredric Jameson, London: Verso. The second unfinished volume was published posthumously in 1985.
• 1960b, Les Séquestrés d’Altona (The condemned of Altona), Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1959.
• 1964a [1964], Les mots , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Words , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Braziller, 1964.
• 1969, “Itinerary of a Thought”, interview with Perry Anderson, Ronald Fraser and Quintin Hoare, New Left Review , I/58: 43–66. Partially published in Situations IX .
• 1971–72 [1981–93], L’Idiot de la famille. Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857 , 3 volumes, Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857 , 5 volumes, Carol Cosman (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981/1987/1989/1991/1993.
• 1980 [1996], “L’espoir, maintenant”, interview with Benny Lévy, Le Nouvel observateur , n° 800, 801, 802. Reprinted as L’espoir maintenant: les entretiens de 1980 , Lagrasse: Verdier, 1991. Translated as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

A.1.2 Collections of works by Sartre

References to Situations will be abbreviated as Sit. followed by the volume, e.g., Sit. V .

• 1947, Situations I: Critiques littéraires , Paris: Gallimard. Partially translated in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), London: Rider, 1955. Reprinted New York: Collier Books, 1962.
• 1948, Situations II , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1949, Situations III: Lendemains de guerre , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964b, Situations IV: Portraits , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964c, Situations V: Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Colonialism and Neocolonialism , Azzdedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (trans), London: Routledge, 2001. doi:10.4324/9780203991848
• 1964d, Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme 1 , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1965, Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme 2 , Paris:, Gallimard.
• 1971, Situations VIII: Autour de 68 , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1972, Situations IX: Mélanges , Paris: Gallimard. Material from Situations VIII et IX translated as Between Existentialism and Marxism , John Mathews (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1974.
• 1976, Situations X: Politique et autobiographie , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken , Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (trans), New York: Pantheon, 1977.
• 1981, Œuvres romanesques , Michel Contat, Michel Rybalka, G. Idt and G. H. Bauer (eds), Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
• 1988, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays , [including Black Orpheus ] tr. Bernard Frechtman et al., intro. Steven Ungar, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• 2005, Théâtre complet , Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

A.1.3 Posthumous works by Sartre

• 1983a, Cahiers pour une morale , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Notebook for an Ethics , David Pellauer (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1983b [1984], Carnets de la drôle de guerre, septembre 1939 - mars 1940 , Paris: Gallimard. Reprinted in 1995 with an addendum. Translated as The War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War , Quinton Hoare (trans.), New York: Pantheon, 1984.
• Tome 1: 1926–1939
• Tome 2: 1940–1963
• 1984, Le Scenario Freud , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Freud Scenario , Quinton Hoare (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• 1985, Critique de la raison dialectique, tome 2, L’intelligibilité de l’histoire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2: The Intelligibility of History , Quintin Hoare (trans.), London: Verso, 1991. Reprinted 2006, foreword by Frederic Jameson, London: Verso. [unfinished].
• 1989, Vérité et existence , Paris: Gallimard [written in 1948]. Translated as Truth and Existence , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Ronald Aronson (intro.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1990, Écrits de jeunesse , Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (eds), Paris: Gallimard.

A.2 Works by others

• Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat (directors), 1978, Sartre by Himself: A Film Directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat with the Participation of Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques-Larent Bost, Andre Gorz, Jean Pouillon , transcription of film, Richard Seaver (trans.), New York: Urizen Books.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1947 [1976], Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Ethics of Ambiguity , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Translation reprinted New York: Citadel Press, 1976.
• –––, 1960 [1962], La force de l’âge , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Prime of Life , Peter Green (trans.), Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1962.
• –––, 1963 [1965], La force des choses , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Force of Circumstance , Richard Howard (trans.), New York: Putnam, 1965.
• –––, 1981 [1986], La cérémonie des adieux: suivi de, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, août-septembre 1974 , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre , Patrick O’Brian (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Translation reprinted London and New York: Penguin, 1988.
• Carnap, Rudolf, 1931, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache”, Erkenntnis , 2(1): 219–241. Translated as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”, Arthur Pap (trans.), in Logical Positivism , A. J. Ayer (ed.), New York: The Free Press, 1959, 60–81. doi:10.1007/BF02028153 (de)
• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1970, Les écrits de Sartre: Chronologie, bibliographie commentée , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 1: A Bibliographical Life , Richard C. McCleary (trans.), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
• Deleuze, Gilles, 2004, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 , David Lapoujade (trans.), Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
• Derrida, Jacques, 1992 [1995], Points de Suspension: Entretiens , Elisabeth Weber (ed.), (Collection la philosophie en effet), Paris: Editions Galilée. Translated as Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 , Peggy Kamuf (trans.), (Meridian), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Fanon, Francis, 1952, Peau noire, masques blancs , Paris, Seuil. Translated as Black Skin, White Masks , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2008.
• –––, 1961, Les damnés de la terre , Paris: Maspero. Translated as The Wretched of the Earth , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2005.
• Foucault, Michel, 1966 [1994], “L’homme est-il mort?” (interview with C. Bonnefoy), Arts et Loisirs , no. 38 (15–21 juin): 8–9. Reprinted in Dits et Écrits , Daniel Defert, François Ewald, & Jacques Lagrange (eds.), 540–544, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 2001, Dits et Écrits , volume 1, Paris: Gallimard.
• Heidegger, Martin, 1957 [1962], Sein und Zeit , Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. Translated as Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans), London: SCM Press.
• Husserl, Edmund, 1913 [1983], Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie , Halle: Niemeyer. Translated as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy , volume 1, F. Kersten (tr.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.
• –––, 1950 [1960], Cartesianische Meditationen eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie , The Hague: Nijhoff. Translated as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology , Dorion Cairns (trans.), The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960.
• –––, 1900/1901, 1913/1921 [1970, 2001], Logische Untersuchungen , two volumes, Halle: M. Niemeyer. Second edition 1913/1921. Translated as Logical Investigations , 2 volumes, J. N. Findlay (trans.), London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1970. Revised English edition, 2 volumes, London: Routledge, 2001.
• Levinas, Emmanuel, 1930 [1963], La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl , Doctoral dissertation, Université de Strasbourg. Published Paris: Vrin, 1963.
• Marcuse, Herbert, 1948, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et Le Neant”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 8(3): 309–336. doi:10.2307/2103207
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1947 [1969], Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le problème communiste , (Les Essais [2 sér.] 27), Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem , John O’Neill (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press.
• Moran, Richard, 2001, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Anderson, Thomas C., 1993, Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Aronson, Ronald, 1987, Sartre’s Second Critique , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Baring, Edward, 2011, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511842085
• Barnes, Hazel Estella, 1981, Sartre & Flaubert , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Bell, Linda A., 1989, Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity , Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
• Busch, Thomas W., 1990, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Cabestan, Philippe, 2004, L’être et la conscience: recherches sur la psychologie et l’ontophénoménologie sartriennes (Ousia 51), Bruxelles: Editions Ousia.
• Catalano, Joseph S., 1974, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (Harper Torchbooks 1807), New York: Harper & Row. New edition Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• –––, 1986, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Churchill, Steven and Jack Reynolds (eds.), 2014, Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts , New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315729695
• Cohen-Solal, Annie, 1985 [1987], Sartre , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Sartre: A Life , Norman MacAfee (ed.). Anna Cancogni (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
• Coorebyter, Vincent de, 2000, Sartre face à la phénoménologie: Autour de “L’Intentionnalité” et de “La Transcendance de l’Ego” (Ousia 40), Bruxelles: Ousia.
• –––, 2005, Sartre, avant la phénoménologie: autour de “La nausée” et de la “Légende de la vérité” (Ousia 53), Bruxelles: Ousia.
• Cox, Gary, 2019, Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre , London: Bloomsbury.
• Detmer, David, 1988, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Dobson, Andrew, 1993, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason: A Theory of History. , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Fell, Joseph P., 1979, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Flynn, Thomas R., 1984, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1997, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason: volume 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2004 [2013], “Jean-Paul Sartre”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/ >
• –––, 2014, Sartre: A Philosophical Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gardner, Sebastian, 2009, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum Reader’s Guides), London: Continuum.
• Gordon, Lewis R., 1995, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
• Henri-Levy, Bernard, 2003, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Howells, Christina (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Sartre , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521381142
• Jeanson, Francis, 1947 [1980], Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre (Collection “Pensée et civilisation”), Paris: Éditions du myrte. Translated as Sartre and the Problem of Morality , Robert V. Stone (trans.), (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Judaken, Jonathan (ed.), 2008, Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Philosophy and Race), Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• McBride, William Leon, 1991, Sartre’s Political Theory , (Studies in Continental Thought), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness
• Sartre’s French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences: Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Debeauvoir & Enduring Influences
• Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde
• Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics
• Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger
• Existentialist Ethics: Issues in Existentialist Ethics
• Existentialist Politics and Political Theory
• The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-Century Existentialism
• Moati, Raoul, 2019, Sartre et le mystère en pleine lumière (Passages), Paris: Les éditions du Cerf.
• Morris, Katherine J., 2008, Sartre , (Blackwell Great Minds 5), Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Mouillie, Jean-Marc and Jean-Philippe Narboux (eds.), 2015, Sartre: L’être et le néant: nouvelles lectures , Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
• Murphy, Julien S. (ed.), 1999, Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Renaudie, Pierre-Jean, 2017, “L’ambiguïté de la troisième personne”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain , 115(2): 269–287. doi:10.2143/RPL.115.2.3245502
• Reynolds, J. and P. Stokes, 2017, “Existentialist Methodology and Perspective: Writing the First Person”, in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology , Giuseppina D’Oro and Søren Overgaard (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 317–336. doi:10.1017/9781316344118.017
• Santoni, Ronald E., 1995, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• –––, 2003, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), 1981, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre , (Library of Living Philosophers 16), La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Schroeder, William Ralph, 1984, Sartre and His Predecessors: The Self and the Other , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. doi:10.4324/9780429024511
• Stone, Robert V. and Elizabeth A. Bowman, 1986, “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at Sartre’s Unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes”, Social Text , 13/14: 195–215.
• –––, 1991, “Sartre’s ‘Morality and History’: A First Look at the Notes for the unpublished 1965 Cornell Lectures”, in Sartre Alive , Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (eds), Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 53–82.
• Taylor, Charles, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Van den Hoven, Adrian and Andrew N. Leak (eds.), 2005, Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration , New York: Berghahn Books.
• Webber, Jonathan (ed.), 2011, Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism , London ; New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203844144
• Walzer, Michael, 1995, “Preface” to the 1995 English translation reprint of Sartre’s Anti-semite and Jew , New York: Schocken Books.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism , by Christian J. Onof at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• U.K. Sartre Society
• North American Sartre Society
• Groupe d'Études Sartriennes
• Flynn, Thomas, “Jean-Paul Sartre”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/sartre/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

aesthetics: existentialist | authenticity | Beauvoir, Simone de | Camus, Albert | existentialism | Fanon, Frantz | Foucault, Michel | Heidegger, Martin | Husserl, Edmund | intentionality | Kierkegaard, Søren | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice | Négritude | Nietzsche, Friedrich | nothingness | phenomenology | self-consciousness: phenomenological approaches to

Acknowledgments

Jack would like to acknowledge Marion Tapper, who taught him Sartre as an undergraduate student. In addition, he would like to thank Steven Churchill, with whom he has worked on Sartre elsewhere and the work here remains indebted to those conversations and collaborations. Thanks also to Erol Copelj for feedback on this essay.

Copyright © 2022 by Jack Reynolds < jack . reynolds @ deakin . edu . au > Pierre-Jean Renaudie < pierre-jean . renaudie @ univ-lyon3 . fr >

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Existentialism and the problem of Nihilism

This paper explores Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, a philosophical theory which emphasizes freedom of the individual with regard to their purpose or essence as Sartre refers to it, and the position of nihilism - a post-modernist theory that rejects the basis for all beliefs regarding morality or intrinsic values-which (as I hope to accurately infer) can be derived from existentialism. Furthermore, through outlining the link between nihilism and existentialism, as well as evaluating arguments supporting the notion of existentialism being interpreted in such a way as to avoid nihilism, I hope to argue that nihilism is an unavoidable aspect of existentialism.

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Akinbode Elijah

Freedom is a necessary prerequisite for living, as most existentialists emphasized. Jean-Paul Sartre, a prominent existentialist, fully appreciated the importance of freedom in helping humans lead authentic lives. In his philosophical magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, he proposed the notion of freedom and responsibility as a moral compass to an authentic existence. This paper will consider problems associated with Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of freedom and responsibility, starting by explaining how Sartre conceived the concepts. This paper will examine some of the objections raised by Alvin Plantinga against Sartre’s philosophy of freedom. And finally, this paper will also analyze Sartre’s notion of freedom and responsibility and reveal its incompatibilities with universal morality.

Danilo Caindoc

Jibon Darshan

Golam Dastagir

James Luchte

Sartre Studies International

Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth

Obioha U Precious

This paper through the comparative and critical methods x-rays the biblical and Sartre " s analysis of the role of man in the fulfillment of his destiny or life aspirations. The paper, contrary to common belief, argues that Christian and Sartre " s existentialism accept that existence precedes essence. However, though the two philosophies share the same point de depart, they differ in their terminus ad quem concerning man " s role in the fulfillment of his destiny.

Payne, Michael and Barbera, Jessica Rae eds. A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Concise summaries of existentialism and of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Rachid Marrakeshi

Juliane Werner

ed. with Alfred Betschart, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2020.

James Tartaglia , Masahiro Morioka

This book is a collection of all the papers and essays published in the Special Issue “Nihilism and the Meaning of Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with James Tartaglia,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.7, No.1, 2017, pp.1-315. Two years ago, in 2015, we published the book Reconsidering Meaning in Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with Thaddeus Metz, and after the publication, one of the contributors to the above book, James Tartaglia, published his own intriguing philosophical book on the meaning of life and its connection with nihilism, entitled Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality (Bloomsbury 2016). I thought it would be a good idea to have a symposium on his book in the Journal of Philosophy of Life. I invited ten philosophers who have a strong interest in this topic, and edited a special volume dedicated to Tartaglia’s book. After receiving their papers, I asked James to write a reply to each of them, and in July this year we published a special issue in the Journal. You can read all of them, along with the replies by Tartaglia, in this single book.

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7 Most Important Nihilist Philosophers (& their Main Ideas)

Nihilism, a philosophical belief that life has no ultimate meaning or purpose. For some it is a relief, for others a source of despair.

Whichever camp you may fall into, it is undeniable that nihilism is a major philosophical theory that shapes modern thought even today. 

In one way or another, nihilistic philosophy has existed for thousands of years. However, nihilism as we know it today has been explored in-depth mostly in recent times by nihilist or existentialist philosophers such as Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Emil Cioran, Friedrich Nietzsche, and more.

Before diving into these nihilist philosophers and explaining their philosophy, it might be interesting to explore some of the major branches of nihilism.

Existential nihilism

Epistemological nihilism, moral nihilism, political nihilism, albert camus, emil cioran, soren kierkegaard, jean-paul sartre, thomas ligotti, friedrich nietzsche, james tartaglia, types of nihilism .

The most popular form of nihilism is called  existential nihilism , which claims that life and the universe as a whole doesn’t have any sort of meaning, higher purpose, or value. 

In regards to humans, existential nihilism claims that human life (and even human civilization) simply “exists” but other than that, it doesn’t serve any higher purpose and doesn’t progress towards an ultimate goal. 

Most existential nihilists believe in the notion that “God is dead”. For them, matter exists, but God does not. 

However, even the nihilists who do believe in God portray him as an indifferent deity. The Nihilist God is a distant, faraway entity that doesn’t care about human suffering or happiness, sins or virtues, achievements or failures. 

The Nihilist God never reveals the sacred knowledge to humans, but he also never punishes or rewards humans for their actions. There is no heaven or hell, no salvation or damnation. 

For existential nihilists, any meaning or purpose humans create for themselves is artificial and only exists as a coping mechanism since, without a purpose, humans perceive life as an absurd experiment of existence. 

Depending on a person’s perspective, existential nihilism can mean a life of liberation or one of despair. On one hand, there is no “right” or “wrong” way to live life, so a person has the freedom to define their own path as they see fit. On the other hand, any efforts made in this life have no lasting value or purpose, and given time, they will disappear like footprints in melting snow.

Epistemological nihilism is a branch of nihilism that concerns itself with knowledge and whether humans can acquire it.

In this case, epistemology means a true understanding of the world, how it functions, its purpose, mechanisms, and ultimate goal.

Unlike an existential nihilist, an epistemological nihilist might even believe in the existence of a divine figure (God or something else) and that every human life does have its own purpose it is progressing towards.

However, an epistemological nihilist believes that humans senses and rationality are simply too limited to discover the true purpose of life, the divine rules that make the Universe work, how to separate good from evil, etc.

Thus, an epistemological nihilist perceives humans as being trapped in a small cage, where the bars are made of our own limited rationality and senses. 

Everything outside the cage is the “true” Universe and God himself, but always out of our reach.

Moral nihilism claims that there is no such thing as a right or wrong action because there is no such thing as a divine or true moral code that says “this is good, this is evil”.

On top of this, moral nihilism claims that even socially constructed moral codes (such as religious ones) don’t have any meaning, and that any claims of the opposite are false. 

According to moral nihilists, any sort of moral code of conduct is artificial and socially constructed for a purpose humans believe is important in a particular culture or time period. 

However, since there is no “true” or “divine” purpose to anything (see existential nihilism above), any purpose or reason behind human moral codes is inherently false, which in turn makes the morality system around that purpose false.

For example, a Christian moral system might say that adultery is a grave sin because God says it is wrong in the 10 Commandments.

However, a moral nihilist might say that since God doesn’t exist (or if God does exist, it is indifferent to mankind), then adultery cannot be a sin either.  

Instead, for a moral nihilist, adultery is an action like any other, neither good nor bad. Thus, for a moral nihilist, cheating on a spouse or drinking a glass of water have the same moral meaning, since they are simply actions that cannot be categorized as good or bad.

Political nihilism is a philosophical approach that believes in the complete elimination of all political ideologies, structures, institutions, and social norms. 

At the core of political nihilism is the belief that all forms of political organization, be it democracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, etc., are not legitimate.

Because these forms of political organization are not legitimate, they do not have the right to exist and, by extension, to pass laws that govern how humans should behave and what they can or cannot do.

At first glance, political nihilism is very similar to anarchism and can even be confused with it.

However, there are some subtle differences that have massive philosophical implications that separate anarchism and philosophical nihilism into different political philosophies. 

Anarchism, at its core, views centralized authority as oppressive and corrupt and, for this reason, must be destroyed and replaced by voluntary associations that cooperate with one another to achieve a harmonious society.

In essence, anarchism believes in a “reset” of society away from centralized authority and towards a more decentralized, voluntary approach to social organization.

By contrast, political nihilism believes that even an anarchic society is illegitimate and it too must be destroyed. 

Crucially, political nihilism never offers a social alternative to whatever political system it destroys. The end goal of political nihilism is achieved when the political system is destroyed, not when it is replaced with something else.  

Nihilist philosophers 

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French-Algerian writer, philosopher, and journalist best known for his philosophical works on absurdism and his contributions to existentialism, even though he personally rejected the latter label. 

The Absurd : At the core of Camus’ philosophy is the concept of the absurd. The absurd arises from the conflict between a person’s desire to know what the meaning of their life is, which is opposed by a Universe or God that is silent, indifferent, and refuses to communicate why the person exists. 

This conflict between wanting to know life’s purpose and the impossibility of obtaining the answer leads to existential despair. 

Revolt against  Absurdity and Suicide : Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” opens with the sentence:

“There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”.

If life doesn’t have any meaning, then why continue living? Camus explores this idea of philosophical suicide, and comes to the conclusion that a person must rebel against the absurdity of living a purposeless life by creating their own internal philosophies and purposes that can give life meaning, even if these purposes are artificial. 

The Value of Life : For Camus, even if life doesn’t have a purpose, it still has value. Camus explores this idea through the use of the Greek hero Sisyphus, a man condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down each time he reaches the top.

Despite the hopelessness and repetition of the task, Camus imagines Sisyphus finding joy in his toil and thus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Notable Works : 

• “The Stranger” (L’Étranger): A novel that delves into the life of Meursault, a man who lives without concern for social norms, future ambitions, or existential crises.
• “The Plague” (La Peste): A novel depicting a fictional outbreak of the plague in Algeria, serving as a reflection on human suffering and the human spirit’s resilience.
• “The Myth of Sisyphus”: A philosophical essay that explores the meaning of life in a world that is cold and indifferent.

Emil Cioran (1911-1995) was a Romanian-born philosopher and essayist who later adopted French citizenship. His work is characterized by its profound pessimism, and its introspective exploration of existential and nihilistic themes. 

Cioran’s philosophy delves deep into the human condition, grappling with topics like despair, suffering, decay, and the futility of existence.

Key themes and elements of Cioran’s philosophy include:

Pessimism : Cioran is known for his deep and unyielding pessimism. He explored the depths of human suffering, despair, and the tragic nature of existence. He often wrote about the inherent meaninglessness of life and the torment it brings.

The Tyranny of Existence and Suicide as Escape : Cioran frequently discussed the idea that existence itself is a burden. He pondered on themes like the curse of birth and the idea that to be born is to be thrown into suffering and decay.

Cioran’s answer to this “Tyranny of Existence” was to frequently contemplate suicide. For him, suicide represented an escape from the tyranny of existence and a potential response to life’s absurdity.

However, rather than acting upon this idea, Cioran wrote extensively about it, using the idea of suicide as a lens to explore the human condition.

Skepticism : Cioran was deeply skeptical of organized systems of thought, especially ideologies that claimed to offer salvation or truth. He was critical of both religious dogmas and secular philosophies that promised meaning or redemption.

Aphoristic Style : Unlike many philosophers who wrote long, systematic treatises, Cioran’s writings are fragmentary, consisting of aphorisms, short essays, and reflections. This style allows for intense, poetic explorations of existential themes.

• “On the Heights of Despair”: His first book, filled with themes of despair and decay.
• “A Short History of Decay”: A collection of aphorisms exploring various themes of nihilism and pessimism.
• “The Trouble With Being Born”: Here, Cioran delves into the problems and tragedies inherent in existence.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and poet whose work deeply influenced and shaped the theory of existential nihilism. 

Kierkegaard’s philosophy is deeply rooted in his Christian beliefs. Unlike later existentialists, who often focused on the absurdity or meaninglessness of life, Kierkegaard saw a passionate relationship with God as the solution to existential despair.

Below are some of Kierkegaard’s key philosophical positions.

The Concept of Despair : Central to Kierkegaard’s philosophy is that humans live in a constant state of Despair, which manifests itself in different ways for every person. This state of Despair exists because a person either doesn’t understand or is not being true to oneself. For Kierkegaard, the ultimate despair is not being in alignment with one’s eternal self, which is rooted in a relationship with God.

Stages on Life’s Way : Kierkegaard believed an individual passed through three stages of existence:

• Aesthetic : This stage is driven by pursuit of pleasure and the satisfaction of the senses. However, because these pleasures lack true meaning they can lead to despair and a sense of being lost and aimless.
• Ethical : In this stage an individual lives according to moral principles and societal duties. This stage represents a person’s deeper commitment to the society around them and a more structured existence than the aesthetic stage.
• Religious : The highest stage, according to Kierkegaard.  An individual who reaches this stage has a personal, passionate relationship with God. Kierkegaard further divides this stage into two: the “Religious A,” where one adheres to religious rituals and societal norms, and the “Religious B,” marked by a deeply personal relationship with God that transcends societal conventions, epitomized by the biblical figure of Abraham.

Leap of Faith : One of Kierkegaard’s most famous ideas is the “leap of faith”, which is a response to the scientific and rational arguments against God’s existence. According to Kierkegaard, there is no way to scientifically or rationally prove God’s existence, so every believer must take a non-rational “leap of faith” to believe in God.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, and literary critic. He was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century philosophy and remains one of the primary representatives of existential nihilism in the public consciousness. 

Here are some key elements of Sartre’s philosophy:

Existence Precedes Essence : According to Sartre, humans first exist and only afterward define themselves. By comparison, a manufactured object, such as a knife, is created for a predetermined purpose or “essence,” while humans are thrown into the world without any inherent purpose and must create their own essence through their actions and choices.

Freedom and Responsibility : For Sartre, humans are born radically free. However, this freedom comes with immense responsibility since every choice we make defines our essence. Because there’s no predetermined path or inherent meaning to life, every action we take is a reflection of our self-imposed values.

Bad Faith (Mauvaise Foi) : This is a behavior where people lie to themselves and deny their own freedom and responsibility, by claiming their life choices were imposed on them by their family, friends, or society.

According to Sartre, bad faith is an escape mechanism for people who cannot handle the stress of total freedom and the responsibility that comes with it. 

For example, a person engages in bad faith when they claim they’re trapped in a toxic job because of societal or familial expectations rather than acknowledging it’s their choice to stay in that difficult workplace.

• “Being and Nothingness”: A complex exploration of human freedom, consciousness, and existential angst.
• “Nausea”: A novel that delves into existentialist themes, depicting a historian who becomes deeply unsettled by the absurdity and meaninglessness of life.
• “No Exit”: A play in which three characters are trapped in a room for eternity, leading to the famous line, “Hell is other people.”

Thomas Ligotti (born 1953) is famous for being a writer of horror fiction instead of philosophy. 

However, his works frequently touch on philosophical themes, and he is especially noted for his deep exploration of existential horror, cosmic horror, and philosophical pessimism. 

His stories often delve into the eerie, brutal, and disturbing aspects of existence.

Below are some of the frequent philosophical themes and elements associated with Ligotti’s work:

Cosmic Horror : Ligotti is heavily influenced by the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. This type of horror emphasizes how insignificant and trivial human life is when confronted with the horrors of a Universe that is immense, indifferent, and often incomprehensible. 

The Horror of Consciousness : In his non-fiction book “The Conspiracy against the Human Race,” Ligotti explores the idea that human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution, a sort of “malignant” development that only brings us suffering by making us aware of our own mortality, that life has no meaning, and that there is no God that awaits us after death.

Anti-Natalism : Drawing from the ideas of philosophers like Emil Cioran and Peter Wessel Zapffe, Ligotti has expressed anti-natalist views, suggesting that it might be morally wrong to bring new life into existence given the inherent suffering of the human condition.

Notable works:

• Conspiracy against The Human Race
• My Work is Not Yet Done

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher who left a deep mark on modern thought. Nietzsche is deeply associated with nihilism, but there is some considerable debate on whether he is a nihilist himself.  

In any case, here are some of the key philosophical ideas of Nietsche:

Death of God : “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” Nietzsche wrote this idea as religiosity and belief in God began to decline in Europe in the late 19th century.  

As belief in God faded, so did the power of traditional Christian morality. Nietzsche feared that this “death” of God would lead to a moral vacuum, where nihilism would reign as the supreme morality. 

Nietzsche feared this possibility, so he sought ways to overcome it.

Will to Power (Wille zur Macht) : Nietzsche believed that every living being, including humans, is driven by a “will to power,” an innate desire to dominate others, achieve success, or overcome obstacles.

This “will to power” manifests itself in all areas of human life: intellectual, political, artistic, business, war or sports.

Übermensch (Overman or Superman) : In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Nietzsche introduces the concept of the Übermensch, a figure whose strength and moral conviction is so great that he can uproot traditional moral values and societal constraints and replace them with the Übermensch’s own values and moral ideas.

This idea often serves as a counterpoint to nihilism.

Critique of Reason and Truth : Nietzsche was skeptical that “truth” was a real concept and also criticized the dogmatic belief in reason. Nietzsche believed that what we call “truth” was simply a social construct, built through social dynamics when one person or social group managed to impose its views on the rest of society.

James Tartaglia is a philosopher known for his works on metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and more specifically, the implications of nihilism. His works touch on a range of topics, but there are a few key ideas and themes that are central to his philosophical outlook:

Nihilism : Tartaglia argues that while life has no objective purpose or meaning, but that this isn’t a reason for despair. Instead, the acceptance of nihilism can lead to a person living more authentically, free from the constraints of seeking some overarching purpose.

Consciousness : Tartaglia has written on the philosophy of mind, particularly on the nature and significance of consciousness. He has criticized certain prevalent reductionist views that attempt to explain consciousness purely in terms of physical processes.

Transcendental Nihilism : Tartaglia introduces the idea of “transcendental nihilism” which claims that our lives are inherently meaningless, but that this realization can lead to a form of transcendence. 

Rather than searching for meaning in religious or non-religious activities, we can overcome our need for a sense of purpose by finding freedom in meaninglessness.

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Nihilism – Abandoning Values and Knowledge Nihilism derives its name from the Latin root nihil, meaning nothing, that which does not exist. This same root is found in the verb “annihilate” -- to bring to nothing, to destroy completely. Nihilism is the belief which:

• labels all values as worthless, therefore, nothing can be known or communicated.
• associates itself with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism, having no loyalties.
• Epistemological nihilism denies the possibility of knowledge and truth, and is linked to extreme skepticism.
• Political nihilism advocates the prior destruction of all existing political, social, and religious orders as a prerequisite for any future improvement.
• Ethical nihilism (moral nihilism) rejects the possibility of absolute moral or ethical values. Good and evil are vague, and related values are simply the result of social and emotional pressures.
• Existential nihilism, the most well-known view, affirms that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.

Nihilism – A Meaningless World Shakespeare’s Macbeth eloquently summarizes existential nihilism's perspective, disdaining life:

Nihilism – Beyond Nothingness Nihilism--choosing to believe in Nothingness--involves a high price. An individual may choose to “feel” rather than think, exert their “will to power” than pray, give thanks, or obey God. After an impressive career of literary and philosophical creativity, Friedrich Nietzsche lost all control of his mental faculties. Upon seeing a horse mistreated, he began sobbing uncontrollably and collapsed into a catatonic state. Nietzsche died August 25, 1900, diagnosed as utterly insane. While saying Yes to “life” but No to God, the Prophet of Nihilism missed both. Beyond the nothingness of nihilism, there is One who is greater than unbelief; One who touched humanity (1 John 5:20) and assures us that our lives are not meaningless (Acts 17:24-28).

1 Camus, Albert, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, Random House, Inc., New York, 1991. 2 Thielicke, Helmut, Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, with a Christian Answer, Greenwood Press Reprint, Westport, CT, 1969.

• What is Ethical Nihilism?
• What is Existential Nihilism?
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Nishitani Keiji’s Philosophy of Culture: The Existential Interpretation of Myth, the Overcoming of Nihilism, and the Future of Humanity

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• Published: 24 October 2023

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This paper provides a reading of Nishitani’s philosophy of culture. It argues that the advent of nihilism is the logical conclusion of what will be called the “fracturing of culture” in which philosophy and religion lose their creative force to revitalize a cultural tradition as the sense of being-in-time that forms the historical life of a historical world. Section two sets out the paradoxical nature of Nishitani’s philosophy of  culture as both a transcendental and existential project. Section three draws attention to the fact that a concept of culture always belongs to a concrete culture as part of its own understanding of itself. Section four interprets the advent of nihilism in terms of a crisis of culture that ensues from the loss of the existential understanding of history that grounds a cultural world, that forms the standpoint of a historical event of worlding, the historical life that we are. Section five examines Nishitani’s project in terms of the reappropriation of a lost tradition through an existential receptive reinterpretation of Buddhism. Section six argues that for Nishitani the advent of nihilism comes about as a result of the negation of myth by science and thus the overcoming of nihilism comes about through the recollection of myth. Section seven determines the nature of myth for Nishitani through a comparison with Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s understanding of myth. Three elements of myth are focused on: 1) myth as an existential confrontation with being-in-the-world; 2) this existential being-in-the-world forms an existential being-in-time; and 3) myth is the position of the imagination, a thinking by means of form-images [keizō 形像] ( Bild , image). Section seven considers the difference between Cassirer’s and Nishitani’s respective accounts of myth. Section nine examines the nature and function of philosophy, science, and religion in terms of their relation to myth and in terms of how they understand interdependent origination. Section, ten ends the paper by considering what is called the “fracturing” of culture and the advent of nihilism.

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Lofts, S. Nishitani Keiji’s Philosophy of Culture: The Existential Interpretation of Myth, the Overcoming of Nihilism, and the Future of Humanity. Journal East Asian Philosophy (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43493-023-00023-6

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Existentialism — Similarities Between Nihilism and Existentialism

Similarities Between Nihilism and Existentialism

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Shared emphasis on individual experience, rejection of absolute truth, struggle with absurdity and despair.

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Home Essay Examples Philosophy Existentialism

Nihilism And Existentialism

• Category Philosophy
• Subcategory Philosophical Theory
• Topic Existentialism

What is one’s purpose in life? What meaning does life have? These are a few of the many questions that countless philosophers and ordinary people have been asking for centuries. This idea of questioning the reason for life is known as existentialism. We have all at one point or another questioned the meaning of our life in relation to the world and its history. Some have taken this idea further and concluded that life is meaningless. Every action, from passing an exam to getting married, has no value. Nothing that one does in this life matters. This is the belief in nihilism, also known as the “philosophy of nothing.” These belief systems may seem foreign to most, but over the course of this world’s history, many people have and some still do believe in them. Having no values and believing in nothing appears to be difficult to uphold in today’s world where it seems as though there is always a right and a wrong. So, how are nihilists and existentialists able to live in this society? How do they view the world in terms of human nature, the state, and religion?

Human nature and the societal institutions of the state and religion are approached in distinct ways by nihilists and existentialists. Although they may seem similar, the philosophies of nihilism and existentialism differ substantially. To understand how the values and morals of a nihilist are different than that of an existentialist, it is imperative to first discuss the beliefs that are present within each ideology. According to Alan Pratt, Professor at Embry-Riddle University and better known for his research on existential nihilism and the meaning of life, nihilism is the belief that “all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated” (Nihilism ¶1). The government, religion, and morality are all rejected by nihilists and instead the idea that life is meaningless is adopted.

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Existentialism, on the other hand, is a theory that emphasizes the existence of an individual solely based upon their own free will and thought. According to this belief of existentialism, first we are simply born, and then it is up to each of us to choose the type of person we are or will become. We have no set path that we are destined to follow and we are void of any predetermined purpose. One of the basic cardinal aspects of existentialism is that humans are born into a universe where our life, the entirety of the world, and our actions, big or small, lack any importance. As esteemed professors and authors Douglas Burnham and George Papandreopoulos discuss, human beings need meaning, but we are stuck in a meaningless universe; we are searching for answers in a world without any answers, and this is knows as the absurd (Existentialism ¶13). We do, however, have the freedom and responsibility to create our own moral code and we must design the morality we want to abide by. Furthermore, according to existentialism, since there is no teleology, “the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world” (Lexicon), it is safe to say that there is no reason behind the existence of the world. If there is no reason behind the creation of the world, then there is also nothing that we must absolutely follow; there is no fate, no order, and no rules. This is where existentialism overlaps with nihilism.

In nihilism, it is believed that the values and morals that one holds to be true are inherently meaningless. Rules mean nothing. Death also is meaningless and so it does not matter whether one is alive or dead. We live and then we die, that is all. It is also imperative that during our lifetime, we do not follow the norms set forth by others, whether it be the expectations of society or even the laws created by the government.

Today, in most countries around the globe, the government establishes a set of rules and the civilians willingly conform to these laws. For the average person, these laws hold a certain value which is why they are upheld and still stand. This value is partly established by the government itself because the people do not get to choose which laws they will and will not follow. The government enforces these laws by establishing fear through the punishment of those who do not adhere to the common law. For a nihilist these laws are meaningless. Nihilists ignore these laws because they hold no true value in their eyes.

Within nihilism, there is a subcategory known as legal nihilism. According to the Parker School Journal of East European Law, legal nihilism pertains to the negative attitude towards the law (354). This form of nihilism negates the belief that societal organization is the result of the great institution of law. Researcher and activist Evgenia Ivanova even went so far as to say that legal nihilism is a destructive phenomenon while discussing the Russian nihilist movement. This movement occurred around the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, where a loosely organized revolutionary movement was linked to nihilism. The revolution called for the creation of a society based on rationalism and materialism. It was during this that anarchist leader Mikhael Bakunin wrote: ‘Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too” (The Reaction in Germany ¶6). Bakunin called upon the public to retaliate against the state’s governance over the people; to Bakunin this control was slowly, but surely clawing away at human freedom. It was at this point in time that nihilism was forcefully at the forefront of politics. The revolutionists not only challenged the state but also the religious authority in charge.

Eventually though, this idea of self-interest and the mutual benefit of the people instead of the state transformed into “political groups advertising terrorism and assassination” (Pratt ¶4). As the author explains, people began to use nihilism and its ideologies as an excuse to spread chaos and disorder. On March 6th, 2017 in Germany, Marcel Hesse stabbed his nine-year-old neighbor fifty-two times and within an hour of the murder he posted a video and pictures of him posing near the dead boy. Hesse was later arrested for the murder of the young boy as well as that of an ex-friend. In his confession, Hesse said that he killed the young boy because “the universe doesn’t care.” Many blamed Hesse’s actions on nihilism. This may seem justified, but it is necessary to remember that nihilism emphasizes the idea anything we do, any action we take, has no value to it. In Hesse’s case, he put no value on human life until he decided to take that life away. The same can be said about infamous serial killers and mass murderers. Some claim that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, were nihilists. Their disregard for human life could have been linked to nihilism up until they decided to kill. By taking those thirteen lives they had essentially placed a value on murder and death. This goes against the philosophy of nihilism because the ideology’s core belief is that nothing has value, including death. Misguidedly using nihilism as his excuse, Hesse had decided not to abide by the authority and the laws of the government.

Existentialists also believe that it is wrong for society to follow laws established by an institution. However, while nihilism states that nothing has value to it, existentialism emphasizes the need to create morals and values. According to existentialism, it is important that each individual lives his own life, as they please, by their own moral code and that following the rules of others instead of creating one’s own moral code is inherently ignorance. While it states that people should not follow the already established laws of the government and echoes nihilism in the case of the meaningless of life, it also emphasizes the importance of each individual creating their own moral code and set of laws. Unlike nihilism, in existentialism the need to create morals and establish values are clear. And so, using the ideas present within existentialism, one could argue that Marcel Hesse created his own moral code of the disregard for human life, and lived up to it by brutally murdering the nine-year-old boy.

As previously stated, both nihilists and existentialists challenge the authority that the institution of religion holds. Quite clearly, nihilism and religion are inherently contradictory. This is due to the fact that nihilism believes that nothing in this world is right nor is it wrong; there is no value to any morals we see as important. Christians, for example, believe that murder is wrong because in the Bible it is written, “Thou shalt not kill” (Romans 13:9 KJV), and since the Bible holds value for them, they follow its teachings and adopt these morals. Nihilists, however, do not put a value on anything, so for them, murder is not wrong nor is it right. In this case, killing is simply an action and reaps no karma or sin. While nihilism establishes that there are no values, religion provides principles that believers must follow.

It is in relation to these principles that religion and existentialism seem to agree upon. One commonality that both ideologies share is the need for morals and values to survive in this world. However, with religion, morals are already preordained for the believers to follow. Existentialism, on the other hand, calls for individuals to ignore these pre-established morals and create their own. Existentialists would argue that religion essentially has an essence, which is described as “a property or group of properties of something without which it would not exist or be what it is” (Lexicon). The idea of the essence of religion goes against the belief that this world has no preset purpose. We choose what we make of ourselves and our actions. Religion is an authority and existentialism challenges authorities already set in place. It wants its thinkers to choose their morals on their own accord and to not blindly to follow those that have been placed upon them.

Existentialism and nihilism are both philosophical ideologies that bring our lives into question. Why do we immediately accept the ideas that we have been taught? Why not create our own morals? Most people today believe in God or at least the in some sort or “higher power,” but existentialism and nihilism have both been on the rise in the past few decades. It is important to understand the reality behind each ideology and exactly what each pertains to in this world. Although both deal with the idea of the meaning of life and essentially our purpose, each has its own belief system. While nihilism rejects any morals and values, existentialism enforces the idea of creating one’s own moral code. Nihilism seems to be on one side of spectrum of the meaning of life: life has no meaning. Meanwhile, most religions are on the other side of the spectrum: the purpose of our life is preordained. It appears existentialism is a combination of both ideologies. We have no predetermined destiny, and so we must be the ones to give our life a meaning.

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Unbearable Meaninglessness: Existential Emptiness Beyond Loneliness

E mptiness is an existential response to the human condition. It’s our search for personal meaning in the face of finite existence, as explained by psychoanalyst  Erich Fromm :

[Man’s] awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison.

Existential emptiness has been described by  James Park  as “an incompleteness of being,” beyond the reach of love and “more profound than all forms of interpersonal loneliness.” It’s the recognition that we’re all that is, without hope or meaning or anything to cling to. We conclude that there is no ultimate significance or importance to life.

Because existential emptiness doesn’t yearn for anything specific, it doesn’t go away by fulfilling our desires. It can be all pervasive or suddenly there, but not necessarily in response to an external event. Both loneliness and emptiness are aspects of the same basic anxiety, which is often felt as we near the discomfort of these states. It’s the fear of experiencing emptiness that manifests as existential anxiety―an ever-present, anxious dread that even lurks beneath happiness, according to the first existentialist Soren Kierkegaard.

Existentialism

Existentialism was named by philosopher  Jean-Paul Sartre . It grew out of the nihilism and alienation fostered in a Godless, meaningless society after World War. Sartre viewed existential emptiness as a consequence of social alienation and spiritual bankruptcy, caused by a lack of meaning and purpose in our relationship to life. He argued that “existence precedes essence,” proposing that it’s up to each individual to give life meaning. His views were expressed by many philosophers, writers, filmmakers, and artists, including Martin Heidegger, Rollo May, Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemmingway, T.S. Elliot, and Edward Hopper.

Existentialists maintained that despite seeming to have everything, people were entertained by propaganda, marketing, and the media, but led shallow, discontented lives, alienated from nature, others, and their authentic self. They were avoiding the anguish of facing that their lives were empty, without an afterlife, meaning, or value. Albert Camus vividly portrayed this in  The Stranger , depicting an absurd universe without hope or illusion, which is described by a man deeply alienated, due to the split between himself and his life the actor and his setting.

Theistic existentialists argued that this emptiness reflected religious poverty that’s not often felt by people “too busy to feel much absence of any kind,” unless they’re shocked into reassessing their lives and sense of meaning by a sudden painful experience [8]. But when it afflicts those who “have it all,” the question arises, what’s the point of existence?

Contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel points out that we live our lives from a subjective point-of-view, meaning that we place importance on what affects us personally―the most dreaded being the reality of our eventual death, decay, and nonexistence, which we can barely imagine. Yet the earth is only a pale blue dot when viewed from a distance. Nagel states that in contrast to our everyday subjective view, when we take a broader, objective perspective, our daily concerns and the things we value most, even our individual existence, have no significance.

Nagel considers that the probability of our conception (and that of our parents and their ancestors), which gave rise to our unique being, was so precarious and fortuitous that its possibility might have perished along with the millions of sperm that didn’t make it on the long journey to fertilize our mother’s waiting egg. Meanwhile, life on earth would have continued without us and will continue after we die.

Contemplating this in its extreme deprives human life of all meaning to the point of absurdity, as depicted in  The Stranger . We become detached observers, where nothing matters. Our dilemma becomes how to live both engaged and detached without denying either viewpoint. Read about  psychological emptiness .

© 2019 Darlene Lancer, LMFT

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John Barth, towering literary figure and revered mentor, dies at 93

Barth, a johns hopkins graduate who later taught at his alma mater for more than two decades, was known for his postmodernist, unpredictable fiction and his exacting, generous teaching.

By Rachel Wallach

John Barth, A&S '51, '52 (MA), groundbreaking and prolific author, revered teacher, and professor emeritus in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, died Tuesday. He was 93.

Image caption: John Barth

Best known for his postmodernist, unpredictable fiction and his exacting and generous teaching, Barth served on the Johns Hopkins faculty from 1973 until he retired in 1995. He is the author of 17 novels and collections of short fiction and three collections of essays. He won a National Book Award, F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

"Not just a master of fiction and of the literary essay, John Barth was a rhetorician on the order of a Samuel Johnson," said Jean McGarry , A&S '83 (MA), Academy Professor and Barth's former student and then colleague in The Writing Seminars. "Well-read and deeply thoughtful, it was a pleasure to be in his company, whether as his student or colleague. Passionate about literature, and with peerless taste, he was full of wit and wisdom, and had an almost scientific gift for anatomizing the elements of fiction: bones, flesh, nerves, heart, and lungs. He was also funny, tall, and handsome, and never missed a trick. In a rare way, he epitomized his fiction in his own gallant and witty person."

Barth's upbringing on Maryland's Eastern Shore left a powerful echo in the coastal settings of many of his books as well as the understated, southern lilt to his voice. After almost embarking on a career as a jazz drummer, Barth stumbled into what was then Johns Hopkins' Writing, Speech, and Drama department. In a 1999 oral history with the Sheridan Libraries' Mame Warren that revealed a self-deprecating sense of humor, he credits his "a la carte" education (his job reshelving books from wheeled carts in the classics and Oriental Seminary stacks of the old Gilman library) with filling in much of the literary background he had not yet accrued.

After earning his master's degree at Hopkins, Barth served on the faculty of Penn State, SUNY Buffalo, and Boston University before returning to Hopkins as professor in what had then become The Writing Seminars with a joint appointment in the English department. He invited authors including Salman Rushdie, Grace Paley, John Updike, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Italo Calvino to read from their work, and they did.

As a teacher, he was famous for never imposing his own style on his students, instead imparting to them a sense of both imagination and craftsmanship. His keen ear as a reader made him a deeply admired mentor; leading by example, he showed students how to dissect stories, listen for style and voice, and discern worthy storytelling—whether in their own writing or that of others.

"One of the delights of sitting in his classroom was hearing him X-ray a story, finding its hidden bone structure and energy source, and still be helpful in cutting away the fat," McGarry wrote for a festschrift for Barth in 2015.

John Barth, writer who pushed storytelling's limits, dies at 93

John barth, novelist who orchestrated literary fantasies, dies at 93.

Michael Martone, A&S '79 (MA), remembers driving to Cambridge, Maryland, for the viewing when Barth's father died. "What I remember is that he told us three stories about funerals he had attended with the usual perfect presentation of his storytelling. It was amazing," said Martone, professor emeritus in the University of Alabama's Department of English. "That even in the midst of that moment he was composing the narratives that would become part of his future narratives and mine. He was all about the story and the famous Freytag pyramid. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, and each part needed tending, revising, and amending. And each part is connected, entwined, and harmonic.

"He was my teacher but also my first and always 'outside' reader," Martone added, noting that Barth had pledged on the first day of class to read his former students' published work if they sent it to him. "I did for forty-plus years, everything I published in magazines and books. And he responded every time with a brief note of receipt and a message of thanks and 'keep going, don't stop.'"

Image caption: John Barth is seated at the head of the table in the old board room at Shriver Hall in this image from the 1970s.

Image credit : Courtesy of the Ferdinand Hamburger Archives, Johns Hopkins University

Barth's fiction has been described as striking a commanding balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay, and displays the characterization and compelling plot more common in more traditional genres. In works described as playful and challenging, funny and deadly serious, his plots fragment and his points of view shift. He covered ground from the Chesapeake Bay to the Bronze Age city Mycenae to a generic housing development. His translated works found wide audiences in languages including Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, and Polish, and continue to make significant appearances in public readings, recordings, adaptations, reviews, and critical essays.

Barth's writing veered from the existential to comical nihilism to metafiction; in 1987's "The Tidewater Tales," a minimalist novelist and maximalist oral historian tell each other stories while sailing around the Chesapeake. "Lost in the Funhouse" features a 13-year-old boy exploring Ocean City, Maryland, with his family and simultaneously commenting on his own story, leaving readers reeling between the plot and the commentary as if visiting a boardwalk funhouse. Other best-known works include "The Sot-Weed Factor," "The Floating Opera," "Giles Goat-Boy," and "Chimera," for which he received the National Book Award for fiction in 1973

In 1995, Barth retired from Hopkins and became a senior fellow at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Hopkins in 2011, was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries hold collections of Barth's manuscripts and books from his personal library, acquired in 2014 . A 2015 exhibit introduced the collection to the public . Typescript drafts with Barth's handwritten corrections offer a glimpse into his writing process, while reviews and critical analyses reveal evolving attitudes toward postmodernism and meta-fiction. The Sheridan Libraries are also processing newly acquired materials, including a set of letters between Barth and his long-time friend and fellow writer Daniel Tamkus. Additional papers can be found at the Library of Congress .

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Christopher Durang, Tony-winning playwright with acid wit, dies at 75

‘i like to mix the serious with laughter,’ he said. ‘it’s a way of admitting that the stories we’re all involved in are crazy.’.

Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and satirist whose blending of absurdist humor, acid wit and philosophical explorations of rage, anguish, family and faith made him a mainstay of American theater for more than four decades, died April 2 at his home in Pipersville, Pa. He was 75.

The cause was complications from logopenic primary progressive aphasia, a neurodegenerative disease, said his agent, Patrick Herold. Mr. Durang was diagnosed with the condition in 2016 but continued to write, albeit slowly, for a few more years.

Although he was courteous and gentle in person, Mr. Durang was best known for plays that left audiences feeling disoriented and unsettled, marked by a brooding sense of menace or existential angst that was partly concealed by bawdy humor, surrealist gags and verbally dexterous monologues.

His work was filled with cultural references (Mick Jagger, Patty Hearst and Bertolt Brecht) and satirized theatrical forms and institutions, poking fun at traditional sitcoms, soap operas and protest plays while also lampooning priests, therapists, parents and other authority figures.

At times, he found humor in the darkest of subjects. His black comedy “Miss Witherspoon” (2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama , told the story of a depressed woman who dies by suicide, travels to the afterlife and refuses to be reincarnated, asking, “Why can’t I just be left alone to fester and brood in my bodiless spirit state?” He described one of his later plays, the post-9/11 satire “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them” (2009), as “a comic catharsis” after eight years of the George W. Bush administration.

“Sometimes people are offended by my plays,” he said in an interview with theater scholar Arthur Holmberg. “They have said no, no this is serious, there is no laughter involved. But I like to mix the serious with laughter. It’s a way of admitting that the stories we’re all involved in are crazy.”

Mr. Durang drew on his own Catholic school upbringing for the religious satire “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” (1979), his first commercial hit. The title character, a dogmatic nun, lectures the audience on her faith’s basic tenets before being interrupted by a group of embittered former students. Verbal sparring ensues, along with a bit of absurdist violence: When one of her ex-students reveals that he is gay, the sister shoots him dead and declares, “I’ve sent him to heaven!”

The play ran off-Broadway for more than two years, with a cast led by a comically icy Elizabeth Franz as Sister Mary. (Discovering that one of her wards has a brain tumor and is overcome with fear, she responds with impatience: “Now I thought I had explained what happens after death to you already. There is heaven, hell and purgatory. What is the problem?”)

Mr. Durang’s other notable plays included “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” (1985), an almost inconceivably buoyant comedy that was inspired by the relationship between his father, an alcoholic, and his mother, who battled depression and had multiple stillbirths. Onstage, the children’s bodies were tossed on the floor by doctors; the mother keeps a calendar recording the days in which her husband is “half drunk” or “dead drunk.”

The play demonstrated what New York Times theater critic Frank Rich described as Mr. Durang’s “special knack for wrapping life’s horrors in the primary colors of absurdist comedy” and brought him his second of three off-Broadway Obie Awards.

Nearly three decades later, he won the Tony Award for best play for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a darkly comic homage to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. The play premiered in 2012 and moved to Broadway the next year, with a cast that included his longtime friends Kristine Nielsen, David Hyde Pierce and Sigourney Weaver.

Set at a Bucks County, Pa., farmhouse that resembled Mr. Durang’s own country home, the play centered on the relationship between three gloomy siblings, including a middle-aged Vanya who rails against the indignities of 21st-century life while lamenting the passing of a kinder, gentler era when “we licked postage stamps.”

The play became Mr. Durang’s biggest hit, making him feel “like I’ve won the lottery” when it was picked up by more than two-dozen regional theaters. Its success, he speculated, may have been because of its ending, which he described as “hopeful, or at least not dark” — a stark departure from such earlier plays as “Sister Mary.”

“I am not purposely trying to be commercial,” he told the Times , “but in my later years, the world seems so upsetting that I want the relief of something working out. You go out of the theater feeling a little relieved that the worst things didn’t happen to the characters.”

Christopher Ferdinand Durang was born in Montclair, N.J., on Jan. 2, 1949. His mother was a secretary, and his father was an architect who fought in World War II and was part of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. They separated when he was 13.

“It was hellish being around them,” Mr. Durang recalled in an introductory essay to “Christopher Durang Explains It All for You,” which collected six of his plays. “I never knew when they were going to explode into screaming.”

His mother took him to musicals at the nearby Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, and at age 8 Mr. Durang wrote his first play, which spanned two pages and was “more or less plagiarized,” he said, “from the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode where Lucy has a baby.”

After graduating from a Benedictine high school, he studied English at Harvard College, where he slipped into a deep depression that was exacerbated, he said, by his parents’ divorce and by his realization that he was gay, at a time when homosexuality was still widely criminalized.

By his senior year, he had rediscovered his love of theater, taking a seminar with playwright William Alfred and putting together a musical parody of the Gospels, which included such songs as “The Dove That Done Me Wrong,” sung by the Virgin Mary. When a Jesuit priest complained in a letter to the student newspaper, calling Mr. Durang “a pig trampling in a sanctuary,” he took it as a badge of honor — including the letter, by his account, as part of his application to the Yale School of Drama.

Mr. Durang graduated from Harvard in 1971 and received a master’s degree from Yale in 1974, the same year he staged his play “The Idiots Karamazov” — a collaboration with fellow playwriting student Albert Innaurato — at Yale Repertory Theatre. The production starred Meryl Streep, another Yale student, as translator Constance Garnett.

Four years later, Mr. Durang made it to Broadway with the short-lived musical “A History of the American Film,” a hyperkinetic tour of Hollywood cinema that interwove references to some 200 films. The production brought him a Tony nomination for best book of a musical, although critics were mixed on the show.

“Like a circus car driven by clowns, powered by soap bubbles and fitted out with … exploding wheels, Christopher Durang’s play wobbles and squeals through some 60 years of American movies,” reviewer Richard Eder wrote in the Times . “Sometimes it stalls or bogs down, but it always gets going again.”

Mr. Durang received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1979. In the wake of “Sister Mary,” he found mixed success with plays, including the psychiatric sendup “Beyond Therapy” (1981), which had a brief run on Broadway and was adapted into a Robert Altman movie, and “Laughing Wild” (1987), a comic two-hander that lasted less than three weeks off-Broadway. The show’s dismal reception caused him to leave town for a rented house in Connecticut, where he lived for three years.

“I really got phobic about New York criticism,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1996, the year he returned to Broadway with “Sex and Longing,” another poorly received comedy. “It was cumulative,” he said.

For a time, Mr. Durang supported himself with acting jobs. He had performed onstage since the 1970s, headlining a cabaret show, “Das Lusitania Songspiel,” in which he and Weaver reimagined Broadway shows like “Evita” in the style of the German theatrical collaborators playwright Brecht and composer Kurt Weill.

Mr. Durang later had small roles in movie comedies, including as a put-upon business executive in “The Secret of My Success” (1987), starring Michael J. Fox, and appeared in some of his own plays, including as the narrator in “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” and as the berobed Infant of Prague in “Laughing Wild.”

From 1994 to 2016, he co-chaired the playwriting program at the Juilliard School in New York with Marsha Norman. He also led a writing workshop for the grown children of alcoholics.

Mr. Durang’s sole immediate survivor is writer and actor John Augustine, with whom he had performed in a cabaret show called “Chris Durang and Dawne.” Mr. Durang said Augustine, his partner since 1986 and husband since 2014, had a “sunny nature” that “opened up positive feelings, possibilities, intuitions,” helping rejuvenate his life and work.

When he was just getting started as a playwright, “I had a bad message in my head that nothing ever works out,” Mr. Durang recalled in a 2006 interview with the Harvard Crimson . “I still have that message. Although now that I’m older, I go take a nap or tell myself to be quiet.”

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‘The Beast’ Review: Master of Puppets

Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers in three different eras, is an audacious sci-fi romance.

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By Beatrice Loayza

Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” is an audacious interdimensional romance, techno-thriller and Los Angeles noir rolled up in one. This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.

The prologue shows a green-screen shoot in which Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) takes directions from a presence off camera and, with expert professionalism, braces herself to confront an imaginary monster. The effect is uncanny, wryly funny, weirdly sensual and very sad. Bonello sustains this unsettling tone throughout the film, although the individual parts are less consistent. This is the toll of shifting time periods, from a costume drama to a modern mockery of incel culture.

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With computer-generated imagery, any opponent — and any era — can materialize in the background. What does this mean for actors? The feeling that great forces move us like puppets runs through Bonello’s genre-bending work (in his 2017 film, “ Nocturama ,” a gang of teenage terrorists hide in a shopping mall and see themselves reflected in the consumerist sprawl).

“The Beast” follows Gabrielle and Louis (George MacKay), who are lovers, in three incarnations, through three timelines: Paris circa 1910, when the city flooded; Los Angeles in the 2010s; and Paris in 2044, a near-future in which artificial intelligence has almost overtaken the work force.

In 2044, Gabrielle is struggling to get a job. A disembodied voice at an eerily vacant employment agency tells her that her emotions make her unsuited to work, and a purification process that scrubs people of their pesky feelings is recommended. “All of them?” Gabrielle asks nervously. She is a pianist and an actor in earlier timelines, so she values her capacity to be moved and react authentically.

Gabrielle opts for a less intrusive process, envisioned as a bath in black goo and a needle prick in the ear, which involves scanning her past lives to reckon with the source of her sorrows.

Bonello was loosely inspired by “The Beast in the Jungle,” a Henry James novella about a man who is convinced his life will be defined by tragedy. The film’s early, belle epoque strand veers closest to this drama, with Gabrielle and Louis in an unconsummated affair, engaging in breathy conversations inflected with philosophy. In Los Angeles, Gabrielle is house-sitting in a glass mansion; Louis, an incel modeled after Elliot Rodger , fixates on her.

The Los Angeles section has the vibe of a surveillance-style slasher flick. Gabrielle’s laptop is infected by a virus that spawns dozens of nasty pop-ups, including one with a fortune teller. All the film’s talk about dreams and the people who exist within them add to this ambient menace.

Bonello has never been shy about showcasing his influences. Here, David Lynch is a lodestar. In Los Angeles, Gabrielle’s blond bob recalls Naomi Watts in “Mulholland Drive,” and she also sheds a tear while listening to a Roy Orbison cover. Then there’s the ending, a red-curtain climax that lands on a screeching revelation not unlike the finale of “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

The horror that hits in the final moments of “The Beast” tears open a fresh wound. What does the future hold if everything can be determined by the past? If new films are rehashes of old ones? If we’re condemned to the traumas of our previous lives? The film connects this to the emergence of artificial intelligence, which imitates but never truly creates. “Fulfillment lies in the lack of passion,” Louis tells Gabrielle. Is fulfillment what lies ahead?

The Beast Not Rated. In French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes. In theaters.

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