ABBAGNANO, NICOLA (1901–1990). Italian philosopher and leading proponent of Italian existentialism. Abbagnano’s existentialist philosophy focused on a critical analysis of the concept of possibility. In his early thought, he was influenced by American pragmatism, especially the work of John Dewey, and was critical of the philosophical idealism of Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce, which dominated Italian philosophy at the time. In the 1930s, he discovered the existentialism of Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, and Gabriel Marcel, as well as the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl; after World War II he encountered the work of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. On this basis he proposed a synthesis and critique of European existentialism in a series of books—La Struttura dell’esistenza (The Structure of Existence), 1939; Introduzione all’esistenzialismo (Introduction to Existentialism), 1942; and Esistenzialismo positivo (Positive Existentialism), 1948—which brought European existentialism to the attention of Italian philosophers.
The focus of Abbagnano’s critique was what he perceived to be a repeated misuse of the concept of possibility. While the centrality of possibility is recognized by Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, the essential indeterminacy, uncertainty, and problematic nature of true existential possibility is, he claimed, ultimately lost in their respective accounts of human existence. In the case of Jaspers and Heidegger, he argued that human existence is understood in terms of an inevitable failure of human projects: for example, the failure to attain transcendent knowledge, or the failure to live authentically. Thus, the idea of possibility tends to be reduced to that of impossibility. In the case of Christian existentialists like Marcel, he maintained that existence is understood in terms of the inevitable success of human endeavors, since those possibilities understood as most authentic, such as the quest for love or moral value, are guaranteed by God, who has the power to realize them. Here Abbagnano maintained that the idea of possibility is conflated with that of potentiality, in that existence becomes a natural development of preexisting dispositions. True existential possibility, in contrast, must be understood in terms of a situation that both limits and establishes choices for action; an authentically possible choice must be freely made and yet uncertain—neither guaranteed to succeed nor guaranteed to fail. Moreover, a normative criterion termed “transcendental possibility” must be fulfilled: the possibility must continue to “remain possible”; that is, a chosen course of action must be sustainable and allow for future growth in the same direction.
ABRAHAM. For Søren Kierkegaard, the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22) exemplifies the absurd nature of authentic religious faith. Abraham is ordered by God to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, and he is set to obey God’s command when an angel intervenes to stop him. Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the story, given in Fear and Trembling, is that Abraham’s willingness to obey God’s command demonstrates a type of suprarational commitment essential to faith. Abraham shows that a “teleological suspension of the ethical” is possible for his act that cannot be justified according to shared ethical norms: The nature of his decision remains irreducibly personal and cannot be communicated to others. Put another way, Abraham illustrates how faith must be understood as issuing from individual conscience rather than from adherence to general rules or principles. While Abraham’s faith is not the result of rational deliberation, it is important for Kierkegaard that it not be understood simply as the result of an act of will: Abraham’s faith depends as much on God’s grace as on Abraham’s intentions. In this sense, Abraham is not presented as a model to be understood, let alone emulated, but as a “wonder,” beyond comprehension. Kierkegaard’s treatment of Abraham is intended in various ways to oppose the rationalist metaphysics of G. W. F. Hegel, according to which faith can be rationally articulated and justified. As Kierkegaard observes, “Abraham had faith . . . by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago” (FT, 36). See also KNIGHT OF FAITH AND KNIGHT OF INFINITE RESIGNATION.
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. Movement in American painting that flourished in the 1950s in and around New York City, emphasizing the spontaneous creation of abstract forms and patterns. Abstract expressionism was sometimes associated with existentialism, though there is little to suggest any substantive link between the endeavors. The critic Harold Rosenberg used existentialist-flavored vocabulary to describe abstract expressionist painting, which he named “action painting.” In action painting, he wrote, the canvas becomes “an arena in which to act” rather than a “space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, real or imagined.” What appears on the canvas is thus “not a picture but an event,” the record of an “encounter” between painter and canvas, which is “genuine” when it preserves the “dialectical tension” ingredient in its creation. The genuine work of the action painter involves “risk,” “will,” and “decision” (The Tradition of the New, 25, 32). Leading abstract expressionist painters included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Clifford Still, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newmann.
ABSURD, THE. The concept of the absurd in existentialism admits of two distinct lines of interpretation. One account, developed primarily in existentialist literature, understands by the absurd a sense of the radical contingency of all things that exist: the sense that everything might be otherwise than it is because there is no ultimate plan or purpose according to which things might be justified. The other, more explicitly philosophical conception of absurdity is limited to actions and choices of human beings. These are said to be absurd to the extent that, as they issue from human freedom, they lack a foundation outside of themselves. The latter view of absurdity was first elaborated by Søren Kierkegaard in the context of Christianity, and was developed diversely by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. A literary understanding of the absurd was expressed by Sartre in his first novel, Nausea, and explored by Albert Camus in his extended “essay on the absurd,” The Myth of Sisyphus.
In its literary guise, the absurd is tied to an experience of radical contingency in which the world, myself, and the universe as a whole reveal themselves as lacking intrinsic meaning or purpose, as “superfluous” or “gratuitous” in the sense that they could just as well not exist. Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea, describes such an experience in which the linguistic veneer of things is peeled away to reveal their brute physical “existence”: “[M]ounting up as high as the sky, spilling over . . . I could see . . . as far the eye could reach. . . . I knew it was the world, the naked World suddenly revealing itself . . . this gross, absurd being . . . . It didn’t make sense” (Nausea, 134). Camus’s account of the absurd also underlines the experience of the physical world as alien or “inhuman”: “[A] stone is foreign and irreducible to us. . . . At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd” (MS, 14).
A distinct conception of absurdity grounded in the problematic of existential freedom and choice was first articulated by Kierkegaard. In regard to faith, Kierkegaard specifies the absurd in terms of the “crucifixion of the understanding” effected by the Christian belief that God has become incarnate in human form, for it is not rationally comprehensible how the eternal could enter into time. Kierkegaard stresses that the authenticity of this belief is lost once probable reasons and arguments for it are adduced; it becomes a matter of rational calculation rather than passionate commitment. A related sense of absurdity in Kierkegaard is illustrated by the biblical story of Abraham. Abraham is considered the father of faith precisely because he is willing to follow God’s command to sacrifice his son despite the fact that it is contrary to his personal desire and to the moral law. Abraham’s ability to maintain two contradictory beliefs—that he must sacrifice Isaac and yet that Isaac will not be lost—is evidence for Kierkegaard of his genuine religious faith. He submits to God’s command at the same time that he believes he will win Isaac back “by virtue of the absurd,” that is, by virtue of his belief in God’s infinite love and wisdom, a belief that cannot be rationally justified. Kierkegaard’s understanding of the absurd thus places the standard pejorative meaning of the terms “ridiculous” or “nonsensical” in a positive light. The absurd reveals the limits of objective reason and expresses the tension-ridden nature of authentic selfhood.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre employs the absurd in a sense that harkens back to Kierkegaard’s idea of commitment to a belief or cause without rational foundation. Freedom, the choice I make of myself through my “fundamental project,” is absurd, Sartre writes, because it is “made without base of support and dictating its own causes to itself . . . . This is because freedom is a choice of its being but not the foundation of its being” (BN, 479). Freedom requires choosing between alternatives within the limits of one’s situation; but at the same time one cannot justify one’s choice by reference to an external standard, since standards themselves are meaningful and binding only by the attitude one chooses to take toward them. Thus, Sartre concludes, authentic choice “is lived in the feeling of unjustifiability; and it is this which is expressed by the fact of the absurdity of my choice and consequently of my being” (BN, 480).
ABSURD, PHILOSOPHY OF THE. See PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD.
ABSURD HERO. See PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD.
ABYSS. See NEGATION/NOTHINGNESS.
ACTION. A voluntary or intentional human behavior, usually but not necessarily the result of conscious choice or decision. French existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre, tend to regard action as determinative of a person’s identity. A person is defined by what he or she does more than by what he or she says, believes, or wishes, and thoughts, wishes, and beliefs often reflect what one would like to be, or to have others believe, more than what one is. Sartre also maintained that behaviors that do not appear to be within conscious control, in the sense that we are normally not aware of choosing them (e.g., emotions), are nonetheless actions for which we are responsible. They are, or stem from, basic existential attitudes that each of us chooses to assume. In this view, virtually all human behavior is a form of intentional, though not necessarily self-conscious, action, and all that one does, feels, thinks, or imagines expresses the fundamental project one has chosen.
ACTION PAINTING. See ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM.
ADORNO, THEODOR (1903–1969). German philosopher and a founding member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Adorno studied at the University of Frankfurt and was active there, along with Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, in the Institute for Social Research (which came to be called “the Frankfurt School”) during the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1934, after the Nazis’ rise to power, he immigrated to Oxford, and in 1938 to New York. He returned to Frankfurt in the early 1950s and was the director of the revived Institute for Social Research from 1958 to 1969.
Adorno was critical of existentialism at the same time that he shared certain existentialist concerns and influences. Along with Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, he was critical of the dehumanizing effects of modern technology and sensitive to the dangers of mass movements like Soviet communism, which compromised individual freedom and conscience in the name of obedience to authority. His interest in Søren Kierkegaard, expressed in his postdoctoral thesis, “Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic” (1965), suggested another common denominator. Adorno developed a critique of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (1972).
Adorno’s main criticism of existentialism was its perceived disregard for social and political realities in favor of a naïve esteem for individual freedom and authenticity. In The Jargon of Authenticity (1965), a highly polemical book, he criticized the obscure language of Heideggerean philosophy as a veil for what he perceived as an antisocial and reactionary politics. Adorno held that Heidegger’s philosophy of individual “authenticity” and “resoluteness” cannot be divorced from his support for German nationalism, evidenced by his involvement with Nazism in the early 1930s. In an essay entitled “Commitment” (The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 300–318), Adorno also criticized Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of committed literature. Citing as evidence Sartre’s own plays and novels, Adorno maintained that committed writers tend toward a predictable “thesis-art” that expounds ideas in the manner of a philosophical treatise and at the expense of attention to form and style. Thus he concluded that artworks produced out of Sartrean commitment backfire in their intention to awaken their readers’s sense of freedom. By conforming to established norms rather than calling them into question, committed works encourage readers to preserve the aesthetic, moral, and political status quo. Adorno’s major philosophical works include The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947, with Max Horkheimer) and Negative Dialectics (1973).
AESTHETIC, THE. See KIERKEGAARD, SØREN.
AESTHETICS, EXISTENTIALIST. See COMMITTED LITERATURE; POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY.
ALGREN, NELSON (1909–1981). American novelist. Algren was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover between 1947 and 1951. Beauvoir and Algren met during her first lecture tour of the United States, and they fell for each other instantly, as “‘each was the most exotic thing the other had ever seen’” (Bair, 333). In his native Chicago, Algren introduced his “French school teacher” to the underside of American life: “‘I introduced her to stickup men, pimps, baggage thieves, whores and heroin addicts . . . . I took her on a tour of the County Jail and showed her the electric chair’” (Bair 335–336). Beauvoir later described Algren as “‘the only true passionate love in my life’” (Bair, 344) and claimed to have mastered English thanks to the 350 love letters she subsequently wrote to him. Algren is memorialized as the character “Lewis Brogan” in Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins.
ALIENATION. For existentialists, to be alienated is to be divorced from one’s true nature as a human being. In general terms, this means lacking a clear sense of oneself as a “being of possibility,” that is, a being who is essentially finite, free, and responsible. Gaining such a sense of oneself is tantamount to attaining authenticity, while remaining alienated is synonymous with existing “inauthentically,” in a manner that is “not one’s own.” Alienation is thus a central problem of existentialism, and it receives diverse treatment from different existentialists. Generally, the accounts of human existence proposed by existentialist philosophers can be understood as attempts to identify the deep sources of alienation and to sketch a vision of authenticity through which it is overcome.
A significant antecedent to the existentialist view was propounded in the 19th century by G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. However, where Hegel and Marx stressed historical conditions of alienation and the circumstances under which these may be overcome, existentialists tend to see alienation as a condition endemic to existence itself. Nonetheless, Hegel and Marx’s influence was profound, and their views set the parameters for many existentialist discussions. Marx’s account of alienation in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 was particularly important for Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre after World War II.
Existentialists generally concur with Hegel and Marx that alienation is a collective and not solely an individual condition, one that affects individuals in and by means of their social setting. At times they describe alienation in terms analogous to those of Marx, as life in a dehumanized world in which people collectively lose sight of their nature as human beings and tend to treat themselves, others, and beings of the natural world as “objects” to be used and manipulated. This they recognize as the world relegated to us by modern science and industrial capitalism. In the words of Martin Buber, it is a world of “things and processes . . . bounded by other things and processes and capable of being measured . . . and compared . . . an ordered world, a detached world” (IT, 82). For Martin Heidegger, in contrast, modern technology and capitalism are expressions of a deeper metaphysical alienation, a turning away from the mysterious character of being itself, coincident with the origins of Western philosophy.
A tension within existentialism is the question of whether alienation is to be overcome individually or (also) by collective means. The classic conception of authenticity proposed by Heidegger in Being and Time is, on its standard reading, highly individualistic, as it suggests that one must extricate oneself from alienating social conventions and seize hold of life’s possibilities on one’s own, through a solitary confrontation with death and anxiety. At the same time, there is an awareness in Heidegger as well as in other existentialists of the interpersonal and social dimensions of authenticity. These are captured in the idea of reciprocity, the notion that self-understanding is necessarily bound up with one’s understanding of others. The claims of reciprocity do not disburden the individual of the challenge of coming to terms with freedom and finitude. They do, however, add the requirement that freedom cannot be authentically grasped apart from recognition of the freedom of others, and this deepens and complicates the problem of existential alienation.
ALTHUSSER, LOUIS (1918–1990). French political philosopher best known for his “antihumanist” interpretation of Marxism that draws on structuralist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Althusser taught at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. His views became an influential reference point in the wake of the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris. A lifelong communist, Althusser developed a critical interpretation of Karl Marx’s philosophy that distinguished between early, humanist writings, such as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Marx’s mature work, especially Capital, which, according to Althusser, abandoned a humanist perspective in favor of a more rigorously objective science of social and economic reality. Althusser argued that Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism avoids naïve economic determinism by acknowledging a principle of “overdetermination” whereby political and ideological, as well as economic, factors are seen as explanatory of human affairs, each being accorded a degree of autonomy.
Like Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology and Michel Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge,” Althusser’s reading of Marx militated against existentialism and phenomenology; these were seen as naïve forms of humanism that focused on individual consciousness and hence ignored unconscious conditions of behavior and knowledge. Specifically, Althusser rejected the view of individual praxis developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).
AMBIGUITY. From a traditional standpoint, ambiguity results from a lack of clarity or precision in linguistic expression and is considered a fault to be avoided, as entities are assumed to have one set of properties that exclude opposite or contrary properties: being healthy excludes being sick, being close by excludes being far away, being black excludes being white, and so forth. In contrast, some existentialists recognize a positive sense in which entities, especially human beings, cannot be exclusively described in terms of one or the other of a pair of properties, like activity and passivity, or subjectivity and objectivity, but must be said to participate in both and thus to exist in ambiguity.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty places emphasis on ambiguity as a deep feature of the world and of human experience, especially the experience of embodiment. The human body for Merleau-Ponty is exemplarily ambiguous: Passive in its reflexes and autonomic responses, at the same time the body plays an active, unifying role in perception, memory, and the use of language and gesture. Furthermore, while my body is experienced by me subjectively, to the point that I tacitly identify myself with it, I also observe it and touch it like an object in the world. For Merleau-Ponty, language and history are also essentially ambiguous. Language is both an external, social form and the immediate expression of subjective thought and experience. History too is ambiguously objective and subjective, for events of the past come to be understood only in light of particular human interpretations, and these in turn influence future events. In the end, Merleau-Ponty understands ambiguity as expressive of a deep ontological truth about the world as it bears on human experience, one that is falsified by the (Cartesian) assumption that the world consists of discrete substances whose properties may be clearly and univocally enumerated.
In similar fashion Simone de Beauvoir points to ambiguity as a defining feature of the human condition. In her analysis in The Ethics of Ambiguity, the manner in which humans exist, as suspended between freedom and nature, mind and matter, self and other, becomes a “tragic ambiguity” only when one of the two poles of existence is denied or suppressed. The ethics of ambiguity require that ambiguity be “assumed” as constitutive of our condition. One consequence of the recognition of ambiguity is an insight into the reciprocity of freedom, that is, that “[my] freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others” (EA, 156).
ANGUISH. See ANXIETY.
ANNIHILATE. See NEGATION/NOTHINGNESS.
ANTHROPOLOGY. See PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
ANXIETY. A central concept of existentialist philosophy, alternately rendered as “dread,” as “anguish” (a translation of the French term angoisse), or left in the original German as Angst. The concept of anxiety receives a range of distinct treatments by different existentialists. Nonetheless, there is general agreement that anxiety is not merely a psychological state that reflects the personality of the individual but an ontological or metaphysical phenomenon that reveals a deep truth about the nature of human beings. The core of the idea is that anxiety is a reckoning of the self with its essential freedom to choose what it shall be, and in the face of its radical responsibility for that choice. The idea is expressed well by Jean-Paul Sartre: “In anxiety I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself” (BN, 40).
An existentialist conception of anxiety was first formulated by Søren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Subsequent accounts by existentialists are variously indebted to Kierkegaard, in particular that of Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. Heidegger assigns the concept of anxiety a major role in the analysis of Dasein, where it is linked to the possibility for authentic existence. The link between anxiety, freedom, and authenticity established by Heidegger is elaborated in a distinct manner by Sartre in Being and Nothingness.
Kierkegaard proposes his view of anxiety in a religious context, where the cause of anxiety is ultimately a concern for the salvation of the soul. Still, his ideas set the parameters for future discussion. The Concept of Anxiety is a developmental account of the subjective experience of sin; here Kierkegaard portrays anxiety as emergent in progressive stages of spiritual self-awareness, where the self becomes increasingly conscious of its freedom to choose and to act and of its responsibility for its choices. Underlying the various experiences of anxiety, Kierkegaard writes, is thus a certain “dizziness of freedom” (CA, 61) peculiar to human beings and “not found in the beast” (CA, 42). Kierkegaard establishes several assumptions preserved by later accounts. Anxiety is an index of human freedom, a metaphysically positive phenomenon expressive of a deep truth about human beings, and as such it cannot be reduced to a “negative” emotion. Anxiety confirms that the human being lives in a mode of deep-seated existential concern for the self, and not solely as a knowing subject or a pleasure-seeking animal.
Heidegger’s account of anxiety in Being and Time cleaves closely to the Kierkegaardian model in several respects. For Heidegger, anxiety is a “fundamental mood” (Grundstimmung) that discloses a deep truth about the human being in its relation to the world: “Anxiety discloses Dasein as being-possible . . .” That is, anxiety “makes manifest . . . its being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself” (BT, 232). In anxiety, everyday concerns and involvements with others, through which an average, standardized understanding of the world is sustained, “sink away,” for “[a]nxiety . . . takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself . . . in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted” (BT, 232). Removed from the tranquilizing interpretations of das Man, Dasein is forced to confront itself apart from the roles assigned to it by others and so becomes aware of itself as a pure “being of possibility,” an “authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world.” For this reason Heidegger insists that “[a]nxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’” (BT, 233). In other words, in anxiety it is brought home to me that it is I, not “they” or “anyone,” who am responsible for interpreting the world, and that I cannot avoid the freedom of choosing certain possibilities over others.
What Sartre in Being and Nothingness calls “l’angoisse” is a conscious development of Heidegger and Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, and to avoid confusion should be called by the same name. Like Kierkegaard, Sartre defines anxiety as “the consciousness of freedom,” and he likens this to an experience of vertigo (vertige). Hiking near a precipice, I am seized with anxiety “to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over . . . but of throwing myself over” (BN, 29). Anxiety thus arises from consciousness of radical freedom, which is normally suppressed: No drive to self-preservation or other psychological motive prevents me from throwing myself off. In another example, Sartre describes the anxiety of a gambler who, having resolved never to gamble again, passes a gaming table and realizes that nothing prevents him from breaking a promise made in the past. In each case, anxiety is a recognition of the “constantly renewed obligation to remake the Self” (BN, 35). Alternately, it is the realization that the self is, at bottom, radical “nothingness”: a lack of substantive causes or content that might provide a foundation for one’s choices and values.
APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN. The terms of this distinction, introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), designate antagonistic principles of human action and artistic creation. According to Nietzsche, the grandeur of ancient Greek tragedy resulted from an exceptional coalition of the two principles. The Apollonian principle represents the drive toward order, reason, and restraint evident in classical Greek sculpture and architecture; the Dionysian principle represents the tendency toward passion, intoxication, and destruction evident in ancient Greek music and ritualistic dance. In Nietzsche’s analysis, Dionysian ritual subsumes the individual within the group, while Apollonian art allows individuality to be recognized and to flourish. The genius of classical tragedy, represented by the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, was to create an art form combining Apollonian and Dionysian elements in a productive tension. From Plato on, however, Nietzsche maintained, Greek philosophy was premised on a denial of the Dionysian element and as a consequence an unhealthy overestimation of the powers of intellect and reason.
Though existentialists make little explicit reference to Nietzsche’s distinction, Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of the origins of early Greek philosophy is loosely analogous. In his later thought, Heidegger discerned in the fragmentary texts of pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus and Parmenides an “originary” and “primordial” understanding of being as emergent, dynamic, and mysterious. In Heidegger’s view, this understanding deteriorated by the time of Plato, when being was conceived in terms of unchanging “ideas” that underly the changing world of nature and sense perception, and are known only by intellection.
ARAGON, LOUIS (1897–1982). French poet and novelist. Originally affiliated with the surrealists, Aragon joined the French Communist Party in 1927, and from that date on was a staunch supporter of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. With his wife, the Russian-born writer Elsa Triolet (1896–1970), Aragon maintained a literary salon and monitored the French literary scene, encouraging young authors to join the Communist Party. Although Jean-Paul Sartre never joined the Party, he remained on friendly terms with Aragon and Triolet.
ARENDT, HANNAH (1906–1975). Jewish German political philosopher whose life and thought paralleled and at several points intersected the development of 20th-century existentialism. Arendt was a highly independent scholar who never identified herself with an intellectual movement. Nonetheless, her work can be seen as a creative extension of insights of existential phenomenology into the political realm, in particular those of her teacher, Martin Heidegger.
Life. Born in Immanuel Kant’s hometown of Königsberg, in Eastern Prussia, Arendt studied philosophy with Heidegger and with Edmund Husserl before taking her doctoral degree with Karl Jaspers, who remained her lifelong friend and mentor. Fleeing Nazi persecution, she moved to Paris in 1933 and worked for a Zionist organization. In 1940, she immigrated to the United States, where she remained officially stateless until becoming a U.S. citizen in 1951. She lived and worked in the United States as a journalist and professor of philosophy, at Bard College and at the New School for Social Research, until her death in 1975. Her major works, published in English, include, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1965), On Revolution (1965), Men in Dark Times (1968), and The Life of the Mind (1978), a posthumous, incomplete work in two volumes. Arendt was an early commentator on existentialism in the United States. Her articles of interest include “French Existentialism” (1946) and “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” (1946).
A formative period for Arendt began during the 1924–1925 academic year, when she enrolled as a student at Marburg University. Her initial intention was to study theology, which she did briefly with Rudolph Bultmann. But soon she was won over to philosophy by the teaching of Martin Heidegger, who enjoyed a reputation as the rising star of the new phenomenological movement centered around Edmund Husserl. Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle and on Plato’s Sophist, which would become integral parts of Being and Time, were perceived as brilliant and difficult. The 18-year-old Arendt was taken by the young professor, and they began a passionate love affair, documented in a series of love letters, which they agreed would be published only after their deaths. Arendt went on to write her doctoral dissertation, “The Concept of Love in Saint Augustine” (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustine, 1929), under Karl Jaspers and gradually to distance herself from Heidegger, whose questioning of being and analysis of Dasein, she thought, left little room for social and political concerns. Later she came to see Heidegger as “the last German Romantic” (Young-Bruehl, 69), whose distrust of modernity and yearning for preindustrial existence led him to align himself with the folly of German National Socialism. By the early 1930s, she had broken with Heidegger and begun a lifelong association with Jaspers, who, although a German nationalist, was suspicious of Nazi rhetoric.
An Engaged Intellectual. Arendt’s experience as a German, a Jew, and a refugee during World War II prompted her to address the historical origins of modern European anti-Semitism and totalitarianism. On Totalitarianism (1951) is a book of great historical erudition, in which Arendt describes the “totalitarian state” as the novel form of social and political organization exemplified by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Arendt became known to the public, however, for her controversial coverage of the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Published in 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil grapples with the question of how a German bureaucrat of middling intelligence could have organized the death of thousands of innocent people without believing he had done anything wrong. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Arendt finds Eichmann’s mind and character normal to the point of banality; he speaks only in cliches and never has an original thought. What is exceptional about him, she maintains, is his inability to distinguish right from wrong and truth from half-truth, and his lack of consistency in his personal beliefs. Eichmann often bragged to coworkers, “I’ll go to my grave laughing because I know that I’m responsible for the death of five million people,” yet he also prided himself on not being a brutal anti-Semite and for developing “friendships” with the Jewish functionaries with whom he “negotiated.” For Arendt, that he sees no inconsistency in these statements is a sign of the peculiar perversity of the Nazi regime: More than merely a tyrannical government, the Nazis used totalitarian methods to transform a civilized nation into a dehumanized twilight world, without consistent standards of truth and falsity and right and wrong.
Although Arendt did not question Eichmann’s guilt and the need for punishment, her book was perceived by many Jewish leaders and intellectuals as anti-Jewish and was widely criticized. The book cost Arendt a long-standing friendship with noted Jewish scholar and philosopher Gershom Scholem, who saw her position as a betrayal of Israel’s interests and ideals.
Phenomenology of the Human Condition. Like that of her mentors Heidegger and Jaspers, Arendt’s work is stamped with a concern for overcoming human alienation. However, while Arendt maintained ties to Jaspers throughout her life and even renewed her friendship with Heidegger after World War II, she can be categorized neither as an existentialist nor as a phenomenologist in any strict sense. Generally, she employs resources of existential phenomenology, mainly derived from Heidegger, in the service of an original philosophy of politics. Arendt’s key insight concerns the crucial status of “public space” (der öffentliche Raum) as a necessary condition for human action. For Arendt, public space was exemplified in the life of the ancient Greek polis, where individuals “revealed themselves” to their peers through speech and action judged by common standards, and where the goals of the community were subject to continual debate. Living and acting together, the Greeks came to distinguish between an impermanent and unpredictable “realm of appearances,” corresponding to the world of public affairs and action, and an unchanging realm of being, corresponding to intellectual thought. Arendt detects in the work of Plato and Aristotle a withdrawal from the vicissitudes of political life, the vita activa, to the reassuring permanence of contemplation. The subsequent history of Western philosophy in the Christian era is for Arendt a story of the valorization of “theory” over “praxis.” Arendt’s analysis thus parallels Heidegger’s view of the history of philosophy as the valorization of being present-at-hand.
Arendt provides a historical and philosophical foundation for her perspective in The Human Condition (1958). Like the existentialists, Arendt rejects the idea of an unchanging human nature: “[N]othing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things” (HC, 10). Instead, she understands by “human condition” something similar to what Heidegger calls the “existentialia” of Dasein, those basic features of existence that give life its human character. Proceeding through a careful interpretation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Politics—again much like Heidegger, with whom she had studied Aristotle in the 1920s—Arendt identifies “natality,” “mortality,” “worldliness,” “plurality,” and “the earth” as key components of the human condition. Among these, plurality and natality may be singled out for their unique contribution. Plurality is the condition of “being among others,” understood as definitive for political life. At the same time, it refers to the fact of human diversity, that individuals are irreducibly plural in their viewpoints rather than repetitions of a universal type. Natality is the condition of being born as an instance of “beginning something new”; “[W]ith each birth something uniquely new comes into the world” (HC, 178). While natality corresponds to action, “the capacity of beginning something new,” plurality corresponds to “speech,” the capacity to reveal “who one is” to others. Arendt’s treatment of the distinction between “who one is” and “what one is” parallels the existentialist distinction between “existence” and “essence.” Action and speech form a complementary whole. Speech is required to elucidate the meaning of one’s acts, and both are required to reveal “who one is” to others. In Arendt’s analysis, the degradation of action into mere “labor” or “work,” and the reduction of speech to the mere communication of information, are major symptoms of modern alienation.
ARON, RAYMOND (1905–1983). French political philosopher, sociologist, and journalist. Aron was Jean-Paul Sartre’s fellow student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the mid-1920s and maintained a friendship with his better-known counterpart through about 1947, when they had a falling out over political differences. While associated with Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Les Temps modernes in the mid- to late 1940s, Aron was not an existentialist. His politics were more conservative than Sartre’s, and he was a critic of what he perceived as the conformity of French intellectuals who hastened to embrace Marxism and Soviet communism. Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) stirred up controversy in France and abroad for its criticism of the way intellectuals (such as Sartre) naïvely supported political revolution while they condemned democracy. Nonetheless, Aron was influential in the development of Sartre’s thought. He was among the first French intellectuals to have firsthand contact with German phenomenology and philosophy of existence, represented by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers. From 1931 to 1933, Aron was a fellow at the French Institute in Berlin, and he persuaded Sartre to apply for the same fellowship the following year. A famous anecdote recounts that it was Aron who first sparked Sartre’s interest in Husserl. In 1932, seated at a café with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Aron remarked, “‘if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’” Beauvoir reports in her memoirs that Aron’s remark had considerable impact on Sartre. “Sartre turned pale with emotion. . . . Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve” (PL, 112). Aron also helped to introduce Sartre to the philosophy of history, the subject of Aron’s doctoral thesis, which Sartre read around 1938. In addition to contributing to Les temps modernes, Aron was for a time an editorialist for Albert Camus’s Combat. From the mid-1950s until his death he maintained a dual career, teaching at the Sorbonne and later at the Collège de France, while at the same time writing influential political editorials for Le Figaro and L’Express. Although she disagreed with his political positions, Hannah Arendt respected Aron for helping German communists flee to France in 1933 during his stay in Berlin.
ATHEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM. In his lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre makes a distinction between “two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian, among whom I would include [Karl] Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel . . . and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom I class [Martin] Heidegger, and then the French existentialists and myself” (EHE, 13). The defining feature of atheistic existentialism, according to Sartre, is acceptance of the idea that there is no human essence prior to human existence, because there is no God to create such an essence. Alternately put, it is the idea that a human being is “nothing else but what he makes of himself.” See also RELIGIOUS EXISTENTIALISM.
AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY. A central tenet of existentialism is that selfhood is not naturally given but must be “won over” from a state of complacency, conformity, and self-forgetfulness. Winning oneself, or authenticity, amounts to accepting one’s essential finitude, freedom, and responsibility and applying this insight in one’s actions. Losing oneself, or inauthenticity, amounts to “fleeing from” one’s freedom and continuing to regard one’s existence impersonally, as something for which one is not ultimately responsible.
The term “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) was introduced by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time, though the idea derives from Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was the first in the existentialist tradition to insist that authentic selfhood must be wrested away from the average anonymity of social life and from “aesthetic” diversions and distractions. Kierkegaard thus speaks of the process of “becoming a self” rather than “being a self.” One becomes “singular” and “particular” (in contrast to remaining generic and universal) through deliberate ethical and religious choice and commitment. Selfhood emerges in the act of commitment and increases with the intensity or “inwardness” of that commitment. The highest level of commitment is occasioned by religious faith, for faith is intensely subjective and yet objectively uncertain; thus, the self that emerges in faith cannot fall back into complacency, nor can it attain self-satisfaction and self-certainty.
Heidegger’s account of authenticity exploits the etymology of the German term Eigentlichkeit, derived from the word eigen, “own”—in the sense of “a room of one’s own”—similar to how the English word authentic derives from the Greek word autentes, “author or originator of an action,” one who does something on his or her own authority. For the most part, Dasein exists in a manner that is not its own; it neither thinks nor acts for itself, but conforms to the expectations of others and accepts the ready-made meanings and values of its world. Heidegger insists that the subject of everyday existence is thus not the individual but das Man, an impersonal “one” or “anyone” to which individuals collectively conform. The project of authenticity begins when Dasein is displaced from this mode of existence, which requires a shock, a confrontation with finitude that Heidegger calls being-towards-death. In the moment when death is grasped not as an abstract possibility that happens to anyone and everyone but as “my death,” my “ownmost (eigenst) possibility,” the everyday world sinks away, leaving me with an acute awareness of my self as a “being of possibility,” that is, a being who is thrown into existence yet remains free to choose itself. Authenticity for Heidegger results from a coordinated “owning up” to facticity and a making “one’s own” of the possibilities present in one’s situation.
Jean-Paul Sartre provides the most detailed account of the psychology of inauthenticity, which he analyzes in terms of the phenomenon of bad faith. Pursued by diverse strategies, the goal of bad faith is to “escape oneself,” to avoid acknowledging one’s freedom and responsibility as a self-determining being. Sartre presents a series of typical portraits: the café waiter who tries to assume the “being” of his social role, to actually “be” a waiter and not merely “play at” being one; the homosexual who accepts society’s judgment that he is determined to act according to a specific human “type”; the idealistic woman who evades her sexuality by dissociating her true self (her mind) from her body (her hand) being caressed by a suitor. In each case, bad faith is a strategy for avoiding the realization that one “makes oneself” through one’s choices and commitments, and that these are without external justification or foundation. Sartre has less to say about authentic existence. Generally, authenticity is defined by Sartre in terms close to Heidegger’s: “To be authentic is to realize fully one’s being-in-situation” he writes in 1940 (WD, 54). However, concrete illustration of authentic existence is lacking in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s subsequent study of the writer Jean Genet, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952), suggests a growing appreciation for the complexity of authenticity and the degree to which it is never untarnished by elements of bad faith.
AVAILABILITY (Fr. disponibilité). Gabriel Marcel describes the normative goal of interpersonal relations in terms of my availability to the other person. I am available to the other when I listen and respond with my whole self, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, rather than with only part of myself: “[T]he person who is available to me is the one who is capable of being with me with the whole of himself when I am in need” (PE, 40). Furthermore, availability involves reciprocity: I remain open and receptive to another person to the extent that I perceive the other to be open and receptive to me. Marcel’s notion of availability bears similarities to Martin Buber’s notion of dialogue between I and You.
AWAKENING. For many existentialists, the activity of philosophy aims not only to describe what is true, but at the same time to awaken individuals to the truth of their existence, namely, to the essential character of human being as finite, free and self-determining, and situated in a world. The phenomenon of awakening is clearly present in Karl Jaspers’ conception of philosophizing as an appeal that arouses in others a sense of freedom and possibility. Martin Heidegger can be seen to share a similar view of the transformative power of philosophical thinking. The scenario at the start of Being and Time is that the “question of the meaning of being” has been “forgotten”: The nature of human being and of being in general have long been taken for granted—and Heidegger’s first task is thus “to reawaken an understanding for the meaning of the question” (BT, 19). Heidegger’s description of authenticity itself, moreover, depends on a type of awakening from an “average” “tranquillized” state, in which we complacently accept social roles and values, to an awareness of existential freedom according to which we take responsibility for our decisions and make certain possibilities our own.
AYER, A. J. See LOGICAL POSITIVISM.