Existentialism :: essays research papers

ExistentialismLike "rationalism" and "empiricism," "existentialism" is a destination that belongs to intellectual history. Its definition is thus to whatever extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophic output of Sartre and his associates notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom for guinea pig Camus and Heidegger repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, the Spaniards Jos Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nicholai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The nineteenth century philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard and Fri edrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophic one. Sartres own ideas were and are better known through his fictional works ( such(prenominal) as Nausea and No Exit) than through his more strictly philosophical ones (such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason), and the postwar years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked to a lower place the term retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted in Paris there were Jean Genet, Andr Gide, Andr Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel Beckett the Norwegian Knut Hamsen and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belong to the club artists such as Alberto Giacommeti and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had bec ome a clich, parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen.It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted to Sartres philosophy alone. But while a philosophical definition of existentialism may not entirely ignore the cultural indispensableness of the term, and while Sartres thought must loom large in any account of existentialism, the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current of twentieth- and now twenty-first century philosophical inquiry, one that has had significant impact on fields such as theology (through Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others) and psychology (from Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss to Otto Rank, R.