Philosophical Cultural Movement of Existentialism

       

How existentialism became popular

References to existentialism are ubiquitous in popular culture today. Unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, we now live in a time where existentialist ideas are widely accepted. But how did such a dramatic change occur? Well, through not just a philosophical but a cultural movement of existentialism! Let's briefly look at what happened.

Influenced by Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's writings, the early 20th century witnessed a number of European philosophers exploring existential ideas. These included Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber (1878-1965), who in the book I and Thou (1922), introduced the premise of human existence as "man with man", an encounter or dialogue between two beings meeting in their authentic existence. This idea later came to have a profound impact on psychotherapy. Others also included German philosophers, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who in his later work Courage to Be (1952), extended on Kierkegaard's ideas and proposed that humans must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite of life's absurdity...

Yet it was not until after WWII in 1940s that existentialism became a well-known philosophical and cultural movement thanks to two prominent French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Albert Camus (1913-1960) who at the time wrote some of the best-selling novels, plays, and theoretical texts dealing with existential themes including Nausea (1938), The Wall (1939), and Being and Nothingness (1943) by Sartre as well as The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), and Caligula (1944) by Camus. While some consider Sartre's writings too cynical, he contributed majorly to existentialism by establishing much of the common existentialist terminology (Hoffman, 2004). Sartre's Being and Nothingness, wherein he claimed that "nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm" was particularly influential and remains an existential class. On the other hand, much of Camus' work concerned with facing the absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus, for instance, he illustrated the futility of existence through the protagonist, Sisyphus who, according to Greek mythology, was condemned to roll a rock up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action for eternity! Such existence seems pretty pointless, right? Yet Sisyphus ultimately found meaning simply by continually applying himself to the task.

Around this time, Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own philosophy and by 1945, Sartre and his associates including Camus and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), had become internationally famous as leading figures of the movement known as existentialism. In just a few years, Sartre had launched his own journal, Les Temps Modernes and given the famous "Existentialism is Humanism" lecture while Camus' earlier fictions and plays had been reprinted and performed. De Beauvoir, a feminist and existentialist as well as a long-time partner of Sartre, even wrote at the time that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us"; existentialism became "the first media craze of the postwar era" (Aronson, 2005)! And the rest is history...

    

References

Aronson, R. (2005). Camus and Sartre: The story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended it. Chigago, IL: University of Chigago Press. 

Hoffman, L.  (2004). Philosophical forerunners of existential psychotherapy. Existential Therapy. Retrieved from http://www.existential-therapy.com/key%20figures/Philosophical_Forefathers.htm

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