Understanding Existentialism

8/17/2019 Understanding Existentialism

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Existentialism

Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy , Vol. 26, No. 2, SPECIAL ISSUE WITH THESOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY (2012), pp. 247-267

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journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26 , no. 2, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Toward the ConcreteThomas R. Flynnemory university

While I was a graduate student at Columbia during the “interesting“ yearsof 1968–70, Lucien Goldmann of Le Dieu Caché fame was a guest professor(in sociology and French, to be sure, not in philosophy).1 I attended his

course on Sartre’s theater in the Department of French. One day out of the

blue, Goldmann asked the class when existentialism began. What a curious

question, I thought. Is he looking for Pascal, or Augustine, or perhaps even

Socrates? He relieved our silence with “1910,” which turned out to be the

year that Lukács published Soul and Form .2 Goldmann was a great admirer

of Geörgy Lukács.There are a lot of possibilities for the starting date of “existentialism,”

whether it be Karl Jaspers’s expounding Eksistenzphilosophie (1938) or hiseven earlier conversation with his friend Erich Frank about Kierkegaard

(July 1914).3 One might cite Gabriel Marcel’s calling Sartre an existential-

ist at one of his “jeudis chez Marcel,” where the younger philosophical

equivalent of “le Tout-Paris” used to gather to philosophize and network.

But regardless of the chronology, one of the books that had a directive

effect on the existentialist movement—one that I think captured its spiritand drive—was Jean Wahl’s Vers le concret , subtitled Studies in the History

Existentialism

50th anniversary sessions: then and now



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anniversary sessions248

of Contemporary Philosophy (1932).4 Not only did it impress both Sartre andBeauvoir, who referred to it several times in their writings, but it seemed

to have focused their attention and that of others seeking a new philosophyto address the contingency of our concrete existence as opposed to what

Sartre called the “digestive” neo-Kantian idealism of their Sorbonne

professors. Not coincidentally, Wahl’s study discussed the philosophies

of Alfred North Whitehead, William James, and Gabriel Marcel. Of the

many candidates for the distinguishing feature of existentialist philosophy,

I would propose this pursuit of the concrete. Certainly, Sartre’s attractionto Husserlian phenomenology was motivated by this concern. Recall

Beauvoir’s story of his discovering Husserlian phenomenology uponRaymond Aron’s assurance that it would enable him to make philosophy

out of his perception of the apricot cocktail glass before them. Whatever

one thinks of this tale, it is clear that the organization and exposition of

Being and Nothingness, as Joseph Catalano has pointed out, was geared torendering ontologically possible an existential psychoanalysis that in turn

would issue in the existential “biographies” of Baudelaire, Malarmé, Genet,

and, above all, his multivolume study of Gustave Flaubert, The Family

Idiot . These are all attempts to grasp what Sartre would subsequently callthe “singular” universal, in effect, the concrete. In the same vein, Marcel

entitled one of the essays in his Creative Fidelity “An Outline of a ConcretePhilosophy” (1940).

Mention of Whitehead, James, and Marcel is not coincidental. The

migration of French and more broadly “European” existentialism to our

shores was eased by a Pragmatism that softened the Yankee suspicion of

abstractions and also fostered by process philosophy, with its critique of

the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness” and its openness to a more fluidmetaphysics. I’m not saying that there was an easy exchange among prag-

matists, process philosophers, and existentialists. Some of the problems

are exhibited in the fallout of John Wilde’s move from the Metaphysical

Society of America (MSA), which was not only neo-Aristotelian but pro-

cessive under the direction of its founder and Wild’s Yale colleague, Paul

Weiss. It would be interesting to know what their conversations, if any,

might have been while on the same campus. As someone who straddles

membership in both the MSA and the Society for Phenomenology andExistential Philosophy (SPEP) to this day, I recall hearing that Wild, whose

work I respected under both descriptions, was especially harsh on his

former friends at the MSA once he left their company.



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existentialism 249

Existential Philosophy “Then”

As Robert Scharff pointed out in the opening session of our commemora-tive celebration, there was something significant at stake in the insistence

on the expression “Existential Philosophy” rather than “Existentialism”

in the title of SPEP at its inception. It had to do with the frequent dis-

missal of existentialism as a purely cultural phenomenon, the expression of

postwar Left Bank anguish and narcissism. In fact, even an admired former

colleague and distinguished phenomenologist once spoke rather ironically

about fellow phenomenologists “splashing about in the Lifeworld!” When

teaching the subject, I have long seen my task as showing the students thatexistentialism is a philosophical movement with literary applications rather

than a literary movement with philosophical pretensions. That Sartre’s

Nausea and Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague are philosophical novelsis beyond doubt. And that the authors of each were awarded the Nobel Prize

for Literature is a matter of record (of course, Sartre turned his down). But

the power of what Aristotle called the “well formed phantasm” to generate

a concept or better, a Hegelian Begriff was never lost on Kierkegaard,

Nietzsche, Marcel, or Sartre, all of whom I would call “philosophers of theimaginary.” When criticized for presenting his plays in the bourgeois cen-

ter of the city rather than in venues on the proletarian periphery, Sartre

replied: “No bourgeois can leave a presentation of one of my plays without

having thought thoughts traitorous to his class.” An example of what

Søren Kierkegaard called “oblique communication,” this is an instance of

concrete thinking. But it is this close association of existential thought with

its imaginative expression that renders it suspect in some circles, where

the preference is for the silhouette rather than the impressionist portrait.If one read French, German, or Italian in the 1940s and 1950s, there

were several introductory, survey studies of existentialist thought available

prior to the founding of SPEP in 1961. Examples include Luigi Pareyson’s

Studi sull’ esistenzialismo (1943), Otto Bulnow’s Deutsche Existenzphilosophie (1953), and Jean Wahl, Les Philosophies de l’existence (1954). Bibliographieswere appearing in several languages:

J. Gérard, A. de Waelhens, and J. Lemeere, “Bibliographie surl’existentialism,” Revue international de philosophie, July 1949, withan addendum on Italian works on existentialism in the same revue,

October 1949;



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existentialism 251

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), In Praise ofPhilosophy (1963), and The Structure of Behavior (1963);

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947);William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963); and

Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Annotated Bibliography of Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 vols. (1974).

I would like to mention a couple of anthologies from subsequent

years—actually subsequent decades—because they illustrate how the

existentialist field in particular but the phenomenological field in generalhad expanded in the “Anglosaxophone” world, as the French like to say,

since the appearance of SPEP and perhaps because of it; for all of the

individuals contributing to these volumes are or were before their deaths

active members of the society. The first is George Schrader’s ExistentialistThinkers: Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty (1967), by eight prominent mem-bers of what one might call the “Yale school” of existentialist thought.

The second example is James Watson’s Portraits of American Continental

Philosophers, thirty years later (1999). I mention the first because it is aclear picture of the Yale school and the latter because, of the twenty-two

philosophers presented, three of whom have died, seventeen are listed on

the program for the fiftieth anniversary of SPEP.

Numerous publications such as Studies in Phenomenology, theContinental Philosophy Review , Sartre Studies International , the InternationalPhilosophical Quarterly (a joint publication between Fordham and the Jesuitfaculty at Louvain), the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, and

just to be ecumenical, the Review of Metaphysics (long associated with itsfounder, Paul Weiss, and the MSA), to name but a few—such established

and respected journals witness the continued strength and relevance of

existential phenomenology in the English-speaking world. One could

survey this material by means of graduate programs that pay consider-

able attention to existentialist theses and themes. Certainly the New

School figures prominently there, as do Yale, Pennsylvania State, and

Northwestern universities for historical reasons. Among Catholic institu-

tions Boston College, Fordham, Duquesne, and St. Louis University wouldrank high in those days, with James Collins already mentioned and Alden

Fisher’s translation of Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior (1963)counted among them.



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But one could survey the material in terms of the issues that

existentialist considerations brought to the table in its conversations with

other major philosophies of the day, especially Marxism in its variousguises. To be sure, there were closer fields for internecine warfare, with

personalists, pragmatists, and Thomists, for example, but the exchange

that received the most attention was the ongoing struggle with Marxism,

especially hard-line Soviet-style Communism that began in the streets and

cafés of Left Bank Paris in the mid-1940s and ended in the same locales in

1968. I recall two graffiti from the events of 1968 that caught my attention

in this respect: “All power to the imagination” (a critique of the French

Communist Party, which, Sartre insisted to his Maoist friends, lacked imag-ination) and “Structures don’t take to the streets” (a thinly veiled attack

on Althusserian Marxism). The issue was existential humanism . Curiously,this is a matter that has returned in post-poststructuralist critiques of a

“sclerotic” existentialism on the part of many critics today, including

some members of SPEP. Let me focus on the Parisian frame of the debate

because much of it reverberated in American locales, especially during the

late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the immediate postwar years, the question was theoretical butparticularly strategic: how to win the minds of the youth coming of age in

the immediate postwar era. The French Communist Party survived the war

with a chiefly positive image thanks to the courage of many of its members

in the Resistance. The party saw existentialist philosophy as a warmed-over

bourgeois individualism that had little new or relevant to offer the next

generation. The existentialist response was stated in the “Presentation”

of Les temps modernes and broadcast, somewhat regrettably, in the lecture

advertised as “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” (1946). It was elaborated insubsequent publications like What Is Literature? (1947) and given impres-sive ontological grounding in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).

Raymond Aron said of this project, from which he distanced himself,

that it undertook the impossible task of uniting Kierkegaard and Marx. In a

sense, he was right. This was the enterprise to which Sartre was committed.

But Aron sold him short when it came to the social ontology of the Critiqueof Dialectical Reason. So, too, did his erstwhile friend and colleague at Les

temps modernes, Merleau-Ponty, in his uncharacteristically harsh book TheAdventures of the Dialectic (1955). Could existentialism formulate a socialtheory in response to its Marxist critics without abandoning what was most

properly its own—its abiding sense of individual moral responsibility?

I have argued elsewhere that Sartre could indeed, as he put it, “reintroduce



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existentialism 253

man into Marxism,” that is, pace Aron, unite Kierkegaard and Marx. Hiskey was exchanging consciousness for praxis, static descriptions for dia-

lectical relations, and turning the whole on the ontological theory of the“mediating third party.”5

Concomitant with this discussion was the primacy of “free organic

praxis,” the nature and force of what Althusser called “structural causality”

and the very notion of a meaning/direction (sens) to history. Again mypoint in mentioning this controversy is that it was played out by various

authors and in different media on this side of the Atlantic. Ron Aronson,

Bill McBride, James Marsch, Bill Martin, Doug Kellner, Betsy Bowman,

Bob Stone, and Fredrick Jameson as well as my own Doktorvater , RobertCumming, are names that immediately come to mind. And the NewLeft Review in addition to the above-mentioned publications devoted aconsiderable amount of space to the issue over the years.

So much for “existentialism then.” How does it fare today? The

“E” still stands proud, if somewhat chastened, in the heading of SPEP.

Does it deserve more than historical honorable mention before retiring

(along with its adherents/supporters) to the golden shores of lotus-eaters,

nut-gatherers, and extinct volcanoes? Many of its themes are perennialeven if their specific “spin” has changed. The basic issues of the individual

and the social, of citizen and government, of biography and history, despite

their respective vestures, are still recognizable in the anti–Wall Street

movement, for instance.

Existentialist Philosophy Now?

There are as many areas of existentialist relevance today as there are fields

of moral responsibility, especially “creative” moral responsibility. This

harkens back to Sartre’s advice in Existentialism Is a Humanism to theyoung person with the moral dilemma of choosing between faithfulness

to his widowed mother and loyalty to his country—the kind of cases that

existentialists have traditionally specialized in and the things that novels

and movies are made of. “Choose,” he counsels, “that is, invent .”6 There is

obviously a continued need for the existentialist virtue of “authenticity” andits disvalue of “bad faith” in current ethical discourse. Doubtless, this fits

existentialism as a “style of life” (as Nietzsche and Foucault might say). But ithas always supported a “content” as well—though that content, “freedom,”

has expanded and deepened as Sartre’s thought grew more contextual



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and concrete. I am not going to pursue this tack because it invites, even

demands, ramification into contemporary issues of feminism, racism, neo-

colonialism, environmental study, globalization, and others that exceed thescope of my talk but not the interests of the audience. I would reserve these

corollaries to the basic question of “humanism” and its supposedly unsal-

vageable, harm-producing connotations—an implicit attack on coffee-table

existentialism—for another time.

Rather, I wish to raise another philosophical topic of ancient interest that

has returned to challenge us in our very notion of what philosophy is and

should be doing today. I have in mind what has come to be called by Pierre

Hadot, Michel Foucault, and others “Philosophy as a Way of Life.”7 In his lastlectures at the Collège de France, Foucault, with explicit reference to Hadot,

distinguished the Socratic ideal of “care of the self” from the Platonic-Delphic

model of “Know thyself,” insisting that such self-knowledge grew increas-

ingly abstract and antiseptic as philosophy became more professionalized

and beholden to the model of the natural sciences in its concept of its goal

and how it should pursue it. The Socratic ideal of self-care, on the other

hand, became increasingly separated from the professional philosophical

model and instead was assumed by spiritual directors, confessors, politicalcommissars, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. Though Hadot took issue

with Foucault’s sharp distinction and separation of this contrast, he agreed

that ancient philosophy up to and including the Stoics and Epicureans was

less about information and more about personal formation.Foucault implicitly, as I recall, and Hadot explicitly cite Kierkegaard,

Nietzsche, and the existentialists as philosophers who have retained

that formative view of their teaching. Foucault granted that the German

Romantics and Hegel combined the formative and informative dimensionsas well. It is this role of existentialist thought in various guises that I

propose as a hopeful beacon for its revival in the twenty-first century after

suffering eclipse by structuralist, poststructuralist, and possibly even

post-poststructuralist philosophies over the last decades. That said, you

can imagine the surprise and the renewed hope I felt when I received the

first official announcement for the next World Congress of Philosophy

scheduled for Athens in 2013. The officers of the International Federation

of Philosophical Societies that sponsors these gatherings selected as thetheme for the entire meeting “Philosophy as Inquiry and Way of Life.”

Suffice it to say in virtue of the foregoing that existentialism has indeed

survived. After all that has occurred in the philosophical world over the last

half century, fifty/fifty is not a bad split!



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existentialism 255

notes

1. Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God , trans. Philip Thody (1955; New York:Humanities Press, 1964).

2. Geörgy Lukács, Soul and Form , trans. Anna Bostock (1910; New York:Columbia University Press, 2010).

3. “It was in that discussion that the movement of existentialism was started”

(Erich Fank, “Erich Frank’s Work: An Appreciation by Ludwig Edelstein,” in

Wissen, Wollen, Glauben [Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1955], 419).4. Jean Wahl, Vers le Concret. Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine

(1932; Paris: Vrin, 2004).

5. Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Problem of CollectiveResponsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism , trans. Carol Macomber(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 33.

7. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford:Blackwell, 1995); and Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Government ofSelf and Others II , trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmilles, England: PalgraveMacmillan, 2011).

Existentialism50th anniversary sessions: then and now

The Challenge of Existentialism, Then and NowWilliam L. McBridepurdue university

John Wild’s highly successful book The Challenge of Existentialism datesfrom 1955;1 it was published by Indiana University Press and based on

his 1953 Mahlon Powell Lectures at Indiana University. Wild was then still

teaching at Harvard, where he had been for many years, but was to remainthere for only five years more, at which point, in 1960, he left—the first

tenured philosopher to do so in modern times in what was still, after all, a

relatively recent history, the system of graduate philosophy education as we

know it having developed only in the late nineteenth century. It behooves



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us to reflect on the fact that when John Wild left Harvard for Northwestern,

for what were to be just a few years before his subsequent move to Yale, and

organized the first Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy(SPEP) meeting in 1961 with the assistance of his younger protégé, James

Edie, the span of time that had passed since those modern beginnings,

years before Wild himself first entered Harvard, was only slightly greaterthan the subsequent fifty-year period that we are commemorating here.

In other words, the wisdom of the ancients that we are here attempting to

invoke is not very ancient, after all.

Wild’s interest in existentialism or, as he would not have minded my

calling it, existential phenomenology had been stimulated by a postwar tripto Europe, where he had first encountered the thought especially of Husserl

and Heidegger during a research leave in the mid-1930s. How much had

transpired during the intervening decade or so! Such massive destruction,

for example, of the major German cities, such as Munich, which at that

time and for some years to come still bore some of the scars of war. So it

was fitting that I began to write this essay while seated in a tranquil park in

Munich, looking up from my paper from time to time to stare at a chestnut

tree with massive roots. But I digress—or perhaps I am becoming a bitconfused. I myself did not attend the two earliest SPEP meetings, though

I began to participate in SPEP immediately thereafter, but I first saw John

Wild even before SPEP had come into existence, when he delivered the

Presidential Address of the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern

Division in December 1960. That meeting, the last of its kind to be held

on a university campus, took place at Yale, where I was a first-year graduate

student, having myself just spent my immediate postcollege year in Europe,

in France, with my principal scholarly focus having been existentialism,specifically Sartrean existentialism.

By the time of his American Philosophical Association presidency,

John Wild had become a missionary, a zealot, for existentialism to a

degree that took him far beyond what one finds in his book. In the latter,

it is true, he already indicated his strong belief that the analytic trend in

philosophy, the increasing dominance of which at Harvard was to be his

main announced reason for leaving there, was rendering our discipline

increasingly irrelevant, whereas existentialism dealt with real-world issues.But in The Challenge of Existentialism Wild still suggests that certain aspectsof metaphysical realism, the modernized version of the Western philosophia perennis to which Wild had subscribed in earlier times, continued to have



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existentialism 257

some correctives to offer in areas in which the existentialists had had too

little to say. By the time of SPEP’s founding, Wild was no longer given to

offering such conciliatory remarks.Now, I have begun by focusing on John Wild and his book not so much

for their own sakes, and not even primarily because of the historical link

between Wild and the fiftieth anniversary of SPEP, but because I think

that his enthusiasm for existentialism had a solid basis when he first gave

it expression,2 and it still does now. Of course, existentialism is far from

being a single doctrine. For Wild, it was Kierkegaard, it was Jaspers, it was

Heidegger, it was Marcel, and it was Sartre—hardly a homogeneous group!

It included, obviously, religious believers, nonbelievers, and nonbelievingbelievers like Heidegger. In fact, what is it, if anything, that these disparate

thinkers have in common? And if we can find it, is this “it” still viable

today?

One way of approaching an answer to the first of these questions is to

consider the title of a book that was especially influential in beginning to

identify existentialism as a single movement, Jean Wahl’s Vers le Concret .(I have always found it amusing, by the way, that John Wild and Jean Wahl

had such similar names. I do not know whether they ever met.) So muchof what passed for mainstream contemporary philosophy in prewar France,

with the single noteworthy exception of Bergson’s philosophy, was irreme-

diably lost in a world of pure abstraction. In Germany it was not quite so

bad, thanks in part to the influence of Husserl and other tendencies, but

still Heidegger’s taking leave of Husserl can be seen as in part a rejection

of Husserlian abstractness. In any case, the challenge of existentialism for

all of those usually labeled “existentialists” certainly involved this quest

for concreteness. A second point in common follows, in a way, from thisfirst: the focus on our responsibility while at the same time putting into

question and radically rethinking the meaning of ethics. One American

philosopher who saw this very well—an individual who is, with few pub-

lications to his credit and having died some years ago already, I believe

largely forgotten today—was George Schrader. George, who was very active

in SPEP in its early years and played a significant role in bringing John

Wild to Yale, thus reinforcing Yale’s position as a major center for gradu-

ate studies in Continental European philosophy, edited a hefty textbook,Existential Philosophers: From Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty, that was at thetime one of comparatively few in this area. The chapter in it on Sartre was

one of my earliest publications, and the chapter on Merleau-Ponty was



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written by David Carr. Anyway, George Schrader’s introduction presented

existentialism as what he called “resurgent humanism” and emphasized

the role of responsibility in existentialism in a way that I had not consideredbefore.3 As we consider the ancestors and early movers of SPEP, it would

be a pity if we neglected to recall the name of George Schrader, who was

by training a Kant scholar but who had an excellent instinctive sense of

where existentialism’s challenge lay.

I might also mention two of George Schrader’s first Ph.D. students,

who were good friends but who went their very separate ways. One was

John Silber, who was to achieve great notoriety in both academic poli-

tics and politics per se. The other was Richard Grabau, a Jaspers scholarwho played a large role, as head for some years, in shaping the Purdue

Philosophy Department.

Even in the early days of SPEP, there were tensions between “the exis-

tentialists” and “the phenomenologists.” I vaguely recall, for example, an

annoyed existential challenge being made by John Wild from the audienceto someone who was presenting a careful analysis of some issue or other

in Husserl. “What does this have to do with real, living philosophical

issues?” he seemed to be asking. This internal tension continued overthe years, until it began to be superseded, as supreme tension, by that

between existentialists and phenomenologists taken together, on the one

hand, and other, newer tendencies in Continental European philosophy—

postmodern tendencies, to use the virtually empty descriptor that we nev-

ertheless find it convenient to use as a shorthand. At one point there was

a campaign to change the name of the society itself in light of these new

realities, but it was defeated for two principal reasons, as I see it: First, there

was some nostalgia favoring the retention of the original name because itwas the original name; second, there was no clear consensus in favor of anysingle successor name.

Meanwhile, there was an undermining of the existentialist consen-

sus itself from both inside and outside. For example, Wild in his book was

already able to report that Marcel had rejected the existentialist label—in

large measure because it had come to be connected above all with Sartre,

whom Marcel had come to despise. Heidegger was known to have serious

doubts about the label as applied to himself, as he had made clear in his“Letter on Humanism,” and indeed one must wonder what of existential-

ism remains in his later work. Sartre had already begun to move in an

increasingly political direction and to regard existentialism, at least for a



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existentialism 259

period of some years, as a mere “ideology” parasitic on Marxism. (It was

on this later Sartre, the author of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, that

I focused in my dissertation, of which John Wild was a reader at the endof his first year at Yale. He was not very happy with Sartre’s later turn to

Marxism—in The Challenge of Existentialism he had presented existential-ism as a barrier against Marxism, among other things—but he was most unhappy with my taking Sartre’s side in the latter’s quarrel with Camus.)

As for Camus himself, he had always maintained that he was an “absurdist”

rather than an existentialist, although very few commentators or shapers of

cultural trends ever took that distinction very seriously. In any case, what

I am trying to suggest is what everyone attending the SPEP conferencealready senses: that existentialism had entered into a process of dissolution

or dispersion, already by roughly the time of SPEP’s founding. And that, as

we know, was fifty years ago.

So, what kind of challenge can it pose today? I think that the question

almost answers itself. First of all, although to speak of the existentialist

outlook as a “humanism” may be a little problematic for a number of rea-

sons, mostly not Heidegger’s reasons, existentialism challenges the alleged

death of man. Now, to base the report of the death of man on the “discov-ery” that the notion of subjectivity as it was first elaborated by Descartes is

inadequate for comprehending what it means to be human is an academic

ploy with little significance in the real world. Nevertheless, man—in the

generic sense, of course—is in real danger of dying, with the root causesof the danger being many. (Heidegger is to be thanked at least for hav-

ing been acutely aware of the danger, although it becomes ever clearer,

as the posthumous publication of some new material from his courses

in the mid-1930s has reinforced, that he was often more inclined to feedthe flames than to contribute any saving grace.) Today, in civic life, there

is an atmosphere of increased deadening, of shutting down dialogue, of

nontolerance, of repression in the name of security and in the name of

economy. What existentialist thought of all stripes does in this regard is tofocus attention on the concrete human individual and on his or her future

possibilities—Heidegger’s saving grace, Marcel’s hope, Beauvoir’s vision

of liberation, and so on—instead of acquiescing in the mold that “they” are

attempting to impose.Second, existentialism makes invaluable contributions to the domain

of ethics, both ethical theory and ethical practice, precisely by admonishing

us that the traditional ways of thinking about ethics, not only in the Western



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tradition but in many traditions, are unjustifiable. We have probably all had

occasion to affirm, at some time, that existentialism is of great importance

for ethics, but when challenged, so to speak, to define existentialist ethics,to say what it is, we are likely to find the task elusive. The reason for thisis precisely because existentialism questions usual assumptions about the

ethical domain. It is radically unconventional, and, as I have already noted,

it throws human actors back on their own responsibility. In a society such

as ours in which, for many, profit maximization is the supreme value, the

existentialist attitude is one of appropriate ridicule of this.

The last of existentialism’s contemporary challenges that I would

like to note here is the challenge to reconsider the relationship betweenphilosophy and the arts, particularly literature. Sartre and Beauvoir tended

to uphold a division between the two in theory while overcoming that same

division in practice. Heidegger, in his later work, increasingly valorized

poetry. At its best, existentialism deprofessionalizes, and it invites openness

and tolerance toward different visions of the world.

So there! To me, although the works that defined existentialism as a

movement must at this point be regarded as classics—as must SPEP and

some of us ourselves—existentialism remains a living approach to theworld, the radical alternative to the values that “they” are trying, though

against considerable opposition right now, to impose on us; in fact, existen-

tialism is a way of life. (I take this occasion to note that the theme of the nextWorld Congress of Philosophy, to be held in Athens in early August 2013,

is “Philosophy as Inquiry and Way of Life.”) And although I began writing

these brief remarks in Munich, I would have rather been in Philadelphia to

share them with a SPEP audience—as indeed, happily, I was.

notes

1. John Wild, The Challenge of Existentialism (1955; Westport, Conn.: GreenwoodPress, 1979).

2. I would like to call attention to “Remembering John Wild,” edited by Hwa

Yol Jung, special issue of the Continental Philosophy Review 44, no. 3 (August2011), based on a panel held at the 2007 SPEP meetings in connection with the

publication of Wild’s posthumous papers, which was made available in time forthe fiftieth anniversary meeting.

3. George Alfred Schrader Jr., “Existential Philosophy: Resurgent Humanism,”

in Existential Philosophers: Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty, ed. George AlfredSchrader Jr. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 1–44.



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Existentialism: A Beauvoirean LineageMargaret A. Simonssouthern illinois university edwardsville

The traditional account of existentialism portrays Simone de Beauvoir

as the philosophical follower of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is credited with

originating the philosophy they shared, including the description of the

Look, and other aspects of relations with the Other found in his book Beingand Nothingness and Beauvoir’s metaphysical novel She Came to Stay, bothpublished in 1943. Beauvoir challenged this traditional account in part in

her autobiographical writings, claiming that her literary works originated

in her own lived experience. But she left unchallenged the traditionalaccount of Sartre as the philosopher, angrily telling me in a 1972 inter-

view that “the only philosophical influence on The Second Sex was Beingand Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre.”1 Her assertion was obviously false,given the philosophical differences in the two works; and the line she drew

between literature and philosophy was untenable, failing to account for the

philosophy in her novels.

A new account of Beauvoir’s work based on original sources became

possible after Sartre’s death in 1980 and Beauvoir’s in 1986. Theirposthumously published diaries and letters show that Beauvoir completed

a final draft of She Came to Stay that Sartre read during a military leave inFebruary 1940, before beginning his own work on relations with the Other

in his War Diary.2 Beauvoir’s diary from 1926–27, written while a philoso-phy student, shows her already working on the problem of the Other years

before meeting Sartre in 1929. I discovered an early formulation of the

problem in her handwritten student diary while working at the Bibliothèque

nationale in 1994. In the diary entry dated July 10, 1927, she writes of herplans to “clearly spell out my philosophical ideas” and deepen her work on

problems that interested her: “The theme is almost always this opposition

of self and other that I felt upon starting to live.”3

Existentialism50th

anniversary sessions: then and now



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The Beauvoirean lineage proposed here includes some familiar

figures—such as Husserl (whose work Beauvoir may have encountered as

early as 1927 through her mentor at the Sorbonne, Jean Baruzi), as wellas Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, although her wartime diary and

letters show that she didn’t read their works until a decade later.4 Beauvoir

read Heidegger for the first time in July 1939 and Hegel’s Phenomenology even later, in July 1940, when she used his idea of History to try and reconcile

herself to the Occupation. Beauvoir first read Kierkegaard in March 1940,

before the Occupation began, but she returned to him in December 1940

as she turned away in disgust from French intellectual collaboration with

the Nazis.Unfamiliar figures in this lineage include the French philosopher

Henri Bergson, a major focus of Beauvoir’s pre–World War II philosophi-

cal engagement, and the African American novelist Richard Wright, whose

influence is evident in Beauvoir’s postwar texts, including The Second Sex .This lineage is meant to be neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Research

on Beauvoir’s early philosophy is just beginning, and other lineages are

suggested in Shannon Mussett and Bill Wilkerson’s forthcoming volume

from the State University of New York Press, Beauvoir Engages Philosophy:Essays on Beauvoir’s Dialogue with Western Thought , which includes mychapter “Beauvoir and Bergson: A Question of Influence.”

Beauvoir’s student diary opens on August 6, 1926, with an entry

revealing the surprising context of her early interest in the problem

of the Other—returning from a pilgrimage to Lourdes she recounts

her struggle with an ethics of self-abnegation and “the absolute gift,”

which she describes as “moral suicide,” proposing instead to achieve an

equilibrium between the duties to self and duties to others. Ten dayslater, on August 16, 1926, comes her first reference to Bergson’s work

Time and Free Will: On the Immediate Givens of Consciousness, which shedescribes as a “great intellectual rapture.” She writes of being “thrilled”

by Bergson’s analysis of “the two aspects of the self” and copies several

pages of quotations from his individualist essay including his criticism

of language (“the brutal word”) for stifling individual consciousness,

his celebration of the “bold novelist,” and his distinction between the

fundamental self and the parasitic “social” self that had so thrilled her:“Within the fundamental self is formed a parasitic self that continually

encroaches upon the other. Many live like this, and die without having

known true freedom.”5



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existentialism 263

Beauvoir’s early engagement with Bergson’s philosophy is featured

in her short story cycle When Things of the Spirit Come First (written from

1935 to 1937), which she describes as a satire on the intellectual passionsof her youth. One of Beauvoir’s main protagonists, Chantal, sees herself

as exemplifying Bergson’s turn to immediate experience, which, ironically,

has become an instrument of self-deception: “Today . . . I understood the

truth of certain pages of Bergson that have long been close to my heart: dis-

secting our fleeting impressions, shutting them up in words, and turning

them into thoughts very often means brutally destroying the impalpable

shimmer that gives them all their value. Yes: what we must do is attune

our consciousness to the changing flow of life.” In an implicit criticismof Bergson’s subjectivist methodology, a confrontation with the Other is

required to expose Chantal’s hypocrisy and bad faith. But Spirit concludeswith a young heroine’s Bergsonean rejection of “ready-made values” and

discovery of self in the turn to immediate experience: “All I have wished to

do was to show how I was brought to try to look things straight in the face,

without accepting oracles or ready-made values.”6

In She Came to Stay, written from 1937 to 1941, Beauvoir launches

a more concerted attack on Bergson’s philosophy, using his subjectivistmethodology to challenge subjectivist metaphysics by describing a sub-

jective experience of the existence of other minds. Françoise, the novel’s

protagonist, begins as a metaphysical solipsist, denying the existence of

consciousnesses separate from her own: “I feel that things which do not

exist for me, simply do not exist at all”; “to me their thoughts are exactly

like their words and their faces; objects in my own world.” In a merged

relationship with her lover, Pierre, she is also, in Bergson’s terms, a

utilitarian thinker trapped by language and social convention: “Nothingthat happened was completely real until she had told Pierre about it. . . .

[S]he no longer knew solitude, but she had rid herself of that swarming

confusion. Every moment of her life that she entrusted to [Pierre] was

given back to her clear, polished, completed, and they became moments of

their shared life.”7 Françoise’s solipsism is threatened by her attraction to a

young woman, Xavière, a sensualist and dreamer who also attracts Pierre.

Failing at her attempts to control Xavière and fearing a separation from

Pierre, Françoise gradually abdicates herself in favor of the young woman,emulating Xavière’s bodily attunement and impulsive behavior.

The crisis comes in a scene at a nightclub where Françoise first cringes

at the sight of Xavière burning her hand with a cigarette and then recoils at



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the sight of herself as an object of Xavière’s hostile, jealous gaze: “Facing

Françoise . . . an alien consciousness was rising. It was like death, a total

negation, an eternal absence, and yet, by a staggering contradiction, thisabyss of nothingness could make itself . . . exist for itself with plenitude. . . .

Françoise . . . was herself dissolved in this void, the infinity of which no

word, no image could encompass.” Françoise later explains her experience

to Pierre, making clear her reliance on subjective, embodied experience:

“I discovered she has a consciousness like mine. Has it ever happened to

you to feel another’s consciousness as something within? . . . It’s intoler-

able, you know.” Beauvoir makes explicit her philosophical challenge to

metaphysical solipsism: “Everyone experiences his own consciousnessas an absolute. How can several absolutes be compatible? The problem

is as great a mystery as birth or death, in fact it’s such a problem that

philosophers break their heads over it.” And she emphasizes a Bergsonean

turn to immediate experience: “For me, an idea is not theoretical. . . . It is

experienced [s’éprouve], or, if it remains theoretical, it doesn’t count.”8

In the novel’s melodramatic conclusion, Françoise finds herself

once again the object of Xavière’s Look, but this time the experience is

accompanied by unbearable guilt and shame: “With horror Françoise sawthe woman Xavière was confronting with blazing eyes, this woman was

herself.” The shame drives Françoise to murder: “She was at the mercy of

this voracious consciousness that had been waiting in the shadow for the

moment to swallow her up. Jealous, traitorous, guilty. She could not defend

herself with timid words and furtive deeds. Xavière existed; the betrayal

existed. My guilty face exists in the flesh. It will exist no longer. . . . Either sheor I. It shall be I.”9

Who originated this philosophical exploration of the Look of theOther—Sartre or Beauvoir? That’s the question that Jessica Benjamin asked

Simone de Beauvoir in our 1979 interview: “So when you wrote in SheCame to Stay that Françoise says that what really upsets her about Xavièreis the fact that she has to confront in her another consciousness. That is

not an idea that particularly came because Sartre was thinking about that,

or it was something that you were also thinking about?” Beauvoir’s answer

was so shocking I had to ask them to repeat it: “SdB: ‘It was I who thought

about that! It was absolutely not Sartre!’ JB: ‘So that is an idea which seemsto me appears later in his work.’ SdB: ‘Ah! Maybe! . . . (Laughter) In any casethis problem was my problem. This problem of the consciousness of the

Other, this was my problem.’”10



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Hazel Barnes attempted to defend the traditional account of Sartre

originating their philosophical work on the Other in a 1998 Society for

Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy program session, pointingto an “altogether definitive passage” on page 255 of his War Diary, where“Sartre describes in detail the first project of love as presented later in Beingand Nothingness.”11 But unfortunately for Barnes’s argument, that passagedates from February 27, 1940, ten days after Sartre’s return from leave on

February 17, when he began working with the ideas from Beauvoir’s novel,

writing in his War Diary that Beauvoir “has taught me something new: inher novel.”12

Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary chronicles the emergence of her postwarphilosophy of communication and political engagement. In January 1941,

during the first year of the Nazi Occupation, cut off from Sartre, who

was in a prison camp, and realizing that individual freedom requires a

free society, Beauvoir abandons both the moral solipsism of She Came toStay and the Bergsonean critique of language. In her postwar philosophy,Beauvoir draws upon the work of the African American writer Richard

Wright, whose influence on French existentialism is extensive and largely

unrecognized.The first two issues of Les temps modernes include a serialization of one

of Wright’s stories. His entire autobiography, Black Boy, was also serial-ized in Les temps modernes. In America Day by Day, a chronicle of her 1947lecture tour of the States, Beauvoir describes Wright as her intellectual

guide to America—including the oppressive system of racial segregation.

Fortunately America Day by Day is now available in a recent retranslationthat restores references to Wright and quotes on racism from Gunnar

Myrdal’s An American Dilemma deleted from the original 1953 edition.Wright employed a subjectivist methodology, influenced by William

James, to describe the psychological experience of black people under

racial oppression, descriptions that provided Beauvoir with a model for

describing women’s oppression in The Second Sex , also, finally, availablein a new English translation. Beauvoir refers to Black Boy in the chapteron the independent woman in claiming that women, like black men,

have to struggle “merely to raise” themselves to the level where white

men begin. Her reference, in the childhood chapter, to the “cursed alter-ity” experienced by Bigger Thomas in Wright’s Native Son suggests theindirect influence (via Wright) of W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of “double

consciousness” on Beauvoir’s thesis of woman as the Other.13



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That Beauvoir continued to draw upon Wright and Bergson throughout

her life is evident in the several volumes of the Beauvoir Series from the

University of Illinois Press. The forthcoming volume, Political Writings, forexample, demonstrates her continuing efforts to expose oppression, while

her continuing interest in a Bergsonean description of the experience of

time is evident in her story “Misunderstanding in Moscow,” in the newly

published fourth volume of the series, “The Useless Mouths” and OtherLiterary Writings.

notes

I would like to express my appreciation to the Society for Phenomenology and

Existential Philosophy Executive Committee for inviting me to join the session

“Existentialism: Then and Now,” to Bryan Lueck for suggesting the theme of

existentialism’s lineages, and to Sheryl Lauth at Southern Illinois University

Edwardsville’s Instructional Technology Services for converting the audiocassette

of the 1979 interview with Simone de Beauvoir to a digital format and showing

me how to prepare the PowerPoint slides that accompanied my presentation.

1. Quoted in Margaret A. Simons, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex”: Feminism,Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield,1999), x.

2. See Edward Fullbrook, “She Came to Stay and Being and Nothingness,” Hypatia 14, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 50–69; reprinted in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir:Critical Essays, ed. Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,2006), 42–64.

3. Simone de Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student, vol. 1: 1926–27 , ed. B. Klaw,S. Le Bon de Beauvoir, M. Simons, and M. Timmermann; trans. Barbara Klaw

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 279.4. For more on Baruzi and Husserl, see my “Beauvoir’s Early Philosophy:

1926–27,” in Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student , 39–40; and for Beauvoir’swartime philosophy and her readings of Hegel, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard,

see my “Introduction,” in Simone de Beauvoir, Wartime Diary, ed. Margaret A.Simons and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir; trans. Anne Deing Cordero (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 2009), 1–35.

5. Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student , 54–55, 66, 58–60.6. Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First. Five Early Tales,

trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 55, 212.7. Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger

Senhouse (New York: Norton, 1954), 16–17, 26; my revised translation.

8. Ibid., 291, 295, 301.

9. Ibid., 401–2.



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10. Margaret A. Simons and Jessica Benjamin, “Beauvoir Interview (1979),” in

Simons, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex,” 10.

11. Hazel Barnes, “Response to Margaret Simons,” Philosophy Today 42 (SPEPSupplement, 1998): 32–33.

12. Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre. November 1939–March1940, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 255, 197.

13. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex , trans. Constance Borde and SheilaMalovany-Chevallier (New York: Knopf, 2010), 736, 311.

Understanding Existentialism

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