[Starting Points]
What Is Existentialism?
Part Five: Existentialism in Twentieth-Century Culture
Douglas Adams’s last book, Mostly Harmless, was published with the tagline, “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Trilogy.” Last summer, I set out to write a blog post to introduce readers to the basics of existentialism. It turned out one post wasn’t enough so I wrote a second, then a third, and then a fourth. Like Adams, I hope to wrap up my series before I die. So really, for sure, I promise, this fifth post is the last in my series on existentialism.
I’ve covered most of major philosophers associated with existentialism in previous posts. But existentialism captures the popular imagination partly because it’s so much more than just philosophy. In this post, I’ll explore some of the ways in which existentialist themes have made their way into twentieth century culture.
But I also shouldn’t talk at such length about existentialism without mentioning its critics. This post will end by considering three lines of critical response to existentialism.
If you want to revisit the previous posts, here’s a quick rundown of where we’ve been.
Part 1: French Existentialism (a focus on Sartre and Beauvoir)
Part 2: Existentialist Themes
Part 3: Historical Antecedents
Part 4: “Broad Church” Existentialism (a look at thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries not called Sartre or Beauvoir who are associated with existentialism)
Existentialism in Literature
More than most philosophical movements, existentialism naturally lends itself to literary treatment. It’s concerned with the question of how we find or make meaning in our lives and with our inalienable responsibility for determining the shape of our lives. You know what else deals in these questions? Stories. A story is essentially a technology for connecting a series of events in such a way that they hang together in a meaningful way.
Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre
There are two related ways that existential themes find their way into storytelling: in terms of their content and in terms of their form. On the level of content, a novel can be “existentialist” to the extent that the narrative or the characters deal with “existential” themes. Simone de Beauvoir’s novels The Mandarins and She Came to Stay feature sophisticated and self-aware characters grappling with the sorts of questions that existentialist philosophy deals with. The central character in Albert Camus’s The Stranger is less intellectually sophisticated but he is an embodiment of Camus’s idea of an absurd hero.
But existential themes can also be formal elements of a work of literature. Twentieth-century modernism brought meta-reflection into the arts with a roar. Painters explored the nature of painting itself, composers built works that probed the limits of musical form, and writers increasingly wove a writerly self-consciousness into their works.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea is a case in point, and also an obvious example of existentialism in literature. The novel takes the form of the diary of a historian working on the biography of a historical figure who also comes to question how we can fit the facts of a person’s life into a narrative without thereby necessarily falsifying it. The form of the novel is itself part of that questioning. Its diaristic form and the lack of traditional narrative structure manifest the novel’s skepticism about life fitting smoothly into the form of a story. The novel confronts the reader with the artificiality of novelistic storytelling while the central character confronts the question of how he can make sense of his own life as well.
Kafka and Others
Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre were all important contributors to existential philosophy, as I’ve noted in previous blog posts. But existential themes find their way into a number of other notable twentieth-century authors with less explicit ties to existentialism. Probably the finest among them is Franz Kafka. The Trial begins with the arrest of Josef K. for reasons that aren’t made clear to him. For the rest of the novel, K. struggles to establish his innocence, while also trying to work out what he’s been charged with. The novel is a masterly treatment of existential guilt, the looming feeling of being guilty, not for this or that misdeed, but as a fundamental condition of existence. Call it an exploration of original sin with an existential twist.
Kafka left three unfinished novels at the time of his death—The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika—but he arguably gave the fullest expression of his literary vision in his short stories. “The Metamorphosis” famously begins with the central character, Gregor Samsa, waking up to find himself transformed into a bug. “In the Penal Colony” has an officer proudly present an intricate torture device that he ultimately submits himself to. Kafka’s stories are strange and unsettling—and explore the tenuous hold we have on the structures of justice and meaning that give shape to our lives.
Other notable works on existential themes include Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky.
Colonialism in Existentialist Literature
It’s worth noting how many of the works I’ve mentioned in this section—all of them by white authors—deal with colonial themes. Camus’s novels are set in colonial Algeria, “In the Penal Colony” has a vaguely colonial feel, Céline’s, Conrad’s, and Bowles’s work all also have colonial settings.
The use of colonial settings differs across these works—as does the sensitivity with which the authors portray non-white characters—but two features stand out. One is the idea of alienation from the mainstream of bourgeois European society. Away from the metropole, the characters in these stories encounter something more raw, more “authentic,” than urbane sophistication. And that points to the other common theme, which is the idea of the colonial setting as a kind of blank canvas where characters are confronted with a freedom—for better and for worse—that is less evident in European cities.
You find a similar aesthetic at work in a lot of American Westerns, the more sophisticated of which—The Wild Bunch or Shane, for instance—also trade in existential themes. Out at the frontier, the rules that bind white civilization together have less of a hold on people. There’s a stronger sense of the rugged individual forced to make his own way through this world.
To put it mildly, a lot of the colonial logic in these stories is what people euphemistically describe as “problematic.” Authors like Conrad and Camus, who were canonized by earlier generations, have been challenged for their use of colonial settings as exotic backdrops for the struggles of white men in which non-white characters are rarely given names and are often presented like forces of nature rather than as people with perspectives of their own. Chinua Achebe’s 1975 lecture/essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” is a seminal work of postcolonial thought.
Black Existentialism
The lack of interest by European existentialist writers in colonized people is damning for another reason. Questions about freedom, identity, and the struggle to live authentically in the face of an oppressive dominant culture are central to existentialist thought. You might think that people other than white men would have some thoughts on this matter.
One obvious instance is Simone de Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex is a crucial entry into both the existentialist canon and the feminist canon. Beauvoir uses the tools of existential analysis to examine the ways in which gender roles are constructed.
Another important strand in exploring existential themes from a position of political oppression has come to be known as “Black existentialism,” although this is more of an umbrella term than one that describes a unified movement.
One strand of Black existentialist thought emerges in the Caribbean with French-speaking Martinican writers Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Fanon was a trained psychiatrist whose books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth analyze the ways in which colonial oppression constructs racial difference and places impossible psychological burdens on colonized subjects. Césaire was one of the leaders of the Négritude movement, which sought to forge a positive Black identity that wasn’t structured by colonial oppression.
In the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk undertakes a sociological and philosophical study of the “double consciousness” required of African-Americans, who must be conscious both of how they see themselves and of how the world sees them.
A number of African-American authors have written literary texts on existential themes. One of the most important existential novels—which I didn’t mention above only because I wanted to include it in this section—is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which a young New Yorker struggles to find a place for himself in a world that treats him as invisible. In both his fiction and his non-fictional essays, James Baldwin also deals with the African-American experience, and the challenges created by a racist society for free and authentic existence.
Existentialism in Drama
There’s something fundamentally dramatic about the existential predicament, and indeed Sartre and Camus both wrote notable plays that dramatize their ideas. Sartre’s No Exit, famous for the line “Hell is other people,” and Camus’s Caligula are two of the most famous of these plays.
But just as a writer like Kafka, who doesn’t explicitly deal in existentialist philosophy, produced works that outstrip Sartre et al in literary quality, likewise there are dramatists whose work trades in existential themes and who wrote much better plays than Sartre and Camus.
Foremost among them is Samuel Beckett, whose best-known plays are Waiting for Godot and Endgame. These aren’t plays about people discussing their existential predicament so much as living it. In Godot, the experience of waiting becomes emblematic of the human experience in general. In Endgame, the feeling of being stuck finds expression in characters living in garbage bins.
Drama traditionally deals centrally with action. Far more so than with novels, the movement of a play depends on characters wanting and trying to do things. Beckett turns this convention on its head by staging plays in which characters contend with their inability to do anything. In the process, he gives vivid illustration to the predicament of existential anxiety, which confronts us with the question of how any activity at all can count as meaningful or worthwhile.
Beckett is taken to be one of the key figures in the “theatre of the absurd,” a term coined by the critic Martin Ensslin to describe a style of drama in which the ordinary conventions of meaningful speech and action break down. Another prominent figure in absurdist drama is the French-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco. His early play, The Bald Soprano, lampoons the conventions of traditional theatre. In Rhinoceros, Ionesco takes aim at modern society’s tendency toward conformity while also calling into question what makes us human in the first place.
Other important plays with existential themes include Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Jean Genet’s The Balcony.
Existentialism in Film
I mentioned above how the genre of the Western often trades in existentialist themes. In bleak settings where the conventional laws of society hold little sway, rugged individuals live and die according to their own laws. The aesthetic and ethic of the Western has found expression far outside the American West. Most notable among these is the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, whose masterpiece Seven Samurai in turn inspired one of the greatest Westerns, The Magnificent Seven.
Film Noir and German Expressionist Cinema
What the Western does for the American frontier, film noir does for the city. These crime dramas depict a world in which the law is a thin mask covering an underlying nihilism. The moral compass of the characters in film noir comes not from any metaphysical or social source of moral authority but from their own hard-won decency. Those lacking the heroes’ courage and authenticity are easily seduced by greed and depravity.
The best noir films—for instance Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil—enhance the bleak and disorienting world of the film with bold camera work. A key influence in this regard is German Expressionist cinema, which rejected cinematic realism with visual distortions and highly stylized performances. Directors like Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Robert Wiene challenged the ostensible objectivity of the medium of film, creating worlds in which characters’ subjectivity takes centre stage.
French New Wave
French New Wave cinema found both formal and narrative approaches that resonated with the existentialist philosophy that gained cultural prominence in the post-War period. Filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffault, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda made stylish films shot through with irony and a sense of the absurd.
Directors of the French New Wave employed a variety of novel camera and storytelling techniques. On one hand, improvised dialogue and non-professional actors conveyed a casual immediacy that contrasted with the more theatrical tools of traditional film. On the other hand, jump cuts and other innovations in the language of cinema, as well as narrative techniques like actors addressing the camera, heightened the audience’s awareness of film as a medium and challenged their expectations. That combination of immediacy and self-awareness resonates with the existentialist’s challenge to societal conventions and the appeal to more authentic modes of existence.
Existentialism in Art
Subjective experience has a central place in existential thought. For one thing, many twentieth-century existentialist thinkers—notably Heidegger and Sartre—are associated with the phenomenological tradition, which emphasizes the systematic study of subjective experience. But the rejection of convention and the importance of authenticity also point to the need for each individual to work out on their own what their lives will amount to.
For that reason, existentialism resonates strongly with twentieth-century expressionism in art. The great forerunner of expressionism is Vincent Van Gogh, whose thick brushstrokes and bold colours manifest a deeply personal vision. Another major early figure in expressionist art is the Norwegian Edvard Munch, whose painting The Scream is often regarded as an emblem of existential angst.
Expressionism first took off as an artistic movement in Germany, where Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and others formed a group known as die Brücke in 1905. The Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky and the Swiss-born Paul Klee also made notable contributions to German expressionism.
After the Second World War, abstract expressionism rose to prominence in the United States. Most famously associated with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and the color field paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, abstract expressionism takes the subjectivity of the artist beyond the limits of representation. Whereas painters like Van Gogh or Munch offered deeply personal representations of what they saw, the abstract expressionists seemed to offer visions of an inner world. Pollock’s drip paintings present viewers with a record of the painter’s own bodily movements over the canvas. Here the vital energy of the artist is itself the subject of the painting.
Critics of Existentialism
I can’t write a five-part series about existentialism without saying that some people really don’t like the stuff. To be honest, I’m quite skeptical of a lot of features of existential thought myself. These thinkers offer some powerful provocations and thinking with them can sharpen our own ideas. But that doesn’t mean we have to accept what they say. I want to close this series by mentioning three lines of criticism that have challenged aspects of existentialist thought.
Marxist Critics
The most prominent strand of criticism within European philosophy comes from Marxist thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. Many of these thinkers draw attention to the way that economic and political structures shape philosophical theories. The individualism of existentialism, far from being a challenge to bourgeois conventionality, is a product of the same capitalist political order that produces the bourgeois worldview. Herbert Marcuse and György Lukács take particular aim at Sartre, arguing that French existentialism lacks political and class awareness.
The most famous critique from the Marxist angle is Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, which skewers the pompous aesthetics of so much existentialist writing. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Adorno challenges the “aura” that the jargon of authors like Heidegger creates around their work. Although freedom is central to existentialist thought, Adorno argues that these thinkers never come to terms with the constraints that capitalism places on people’s freedoms—and how the constraints of capitalism also structure the existentialist outlook.
Iris Murdoch
The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch is one of the most astute critics of existentialism from within Anglophone philosophy. She was an early enthusiast for existentialism, and wrote the first book-length study of Sartre in English, before growing disenchanted with its subjective individualism. Murdoch questions the existentialist’s emphasis on ultimately ungrounded identity-defining choices. She argues that this conception of a self as defined by its choices derives from an unacceptably thin conception of the inner life.
Murdoch develops a conception of morality that’s based less on choice and more on vision. Before we act, we must perceive the moral situation, and this requires a very particular kind of attention. That attention is necessarily selfless: the more we let go of ego and will, the more clearly we can attend to the situation. Murdoch thinks that the existentialist emphasis on choice places the emphasis in the wrong place and puts all its weight on the ego-driven will.
Martin Heidegger
The last critic of existentialism I want to consider figured in my previous post as one of the key figures in existentialism itself: Martin Heidegger. After publishing his monumental Being and Time in 1927, Heidegger’s thought took what he called a “turn” in the late 1920s. Although he never disavowed Being and Time, his later thought questions the subjective focus of much existentialist thought—including, implicitly, that of Being and Time. More explicitly, Heidegger criticizes Nietzsche and Sartre for following a trajectory in Western metaphysics that regards the world as merely means to human ends, and which gives central focus to human will. In his later thought, Heidegger takes the spotlight away from the individual and tries to retrieve a basic openness to being.
Heidegger and Murdoch are very different thinkers but for both of them, the criticism of existentialism is that it places too much emphasis on the individual will. Instead, they advocate a greater openness—even a surrender—to a reality that’s external to the self.