GADAMER, HANS-GEORG (1900–2002). German philosopher. Gadamer was a student of Martin Heidegger from 1923 to 1929. On the basis of Heidegger’s teaching, Gadamer developed a systematic approach to hermeneutics, the theory of human understanding and interpretation. This is expressed in his major work, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960). Gadamer stresses the historical situatedeness and the open-ended character of hermeneutical understanding (Verstehen). Like Heidegger, he views ostensibly ahistorical applications of reason, such as scientific theories, as historically conditioned: Theories can be formulated only on the basis of background assumptions relative to a specific cultural and historical tradition. Fortunately, background assumptions, or horizons of understanding, are not entirely closed and static. They remain open and flexible to a degree, allowing for a “merging” of one’s horizons with those of the other—text, person, or artwork—one seeks to understand. Gadamer’s emphasis on the finite and perspectival nature of understanding, and his view of the history of philosophy as an ongoing conversation between self and other, bear comparison with the philosophy of Karl Jaspers.
GENERAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY (Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 1913). Karl Jaspers’s first published work was written while he was pursuing an academic career in psychology at the University of Heidelberg, several years before his discovery of the philosophy of existence. The book is a catalogue of psychiatric theories and mental disorders. Nonetheless, it is distinguished by its phenomenological descriptions of various mental illnesses and its suggestion that first-person experience (i.e., that of the patient) may be essential to proper diagnosis and classification. Jean-Paul Sartre helped to translate Jaspers’s book into French as a philosophy student in the late 1920s.
GENET, JEAN (1910–1986). French novelist, diarist, and poet. Genet met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the mid-1940s and became a member of Sartre’s circle in Paris. A petty criminal and homosexual who had served time in prison, Genet was attractive to Sartre for his underworld aura, individualism, and psychological complexity as well as for his adventurous prose. Sartre devoted a 600-page study to Genet, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952), an outstanding example of what Sartre called existential psychoanalysis. The book probed Genet’s writing for clues to his past and his inner life, the “original choice” that made him into the person he is. It also explored in concrete detail notions of freedom, bad faith, and authenticity sketched more abstractly in Being and Nothingness.
According to Sartre, Genet exemplifies the tension between subjectivity and objectivity, being-for-self and being-for-others that is constitutive for existence. An orphan taken in as a young child by French peasants, Genet was a bright student who aimed to please others, yet he remained unsure of his identity. At age 10, he was caught stealing and was told, “You are a thief.” According to Sartre, this objectifying judgment is a “cruel punishment,” which became the key to Genet’s identity and the source of unresolvable conflicts that are played out in his writing. Genet is torn between the objectifying gaze that “petrifies” him in his being (as a thief and a social misfit) and his experience of himself as a free consciousness without fixed nature or essence (in addition to stealing, he is attracted to beauty, suffering, and the idea of saintliness; Sartre observes that he is not intrinsically “evil,” only society’s judgment makes him so).
Sartre recognizes that Genet is not free to create himself ex nihilo; he is free only to make something of what others have made of him. This is an important clarification of the idea of radical freedom expounded in Being and Nothingness, for it acknowledges the power of social relations and institutions in the constitution of personal identity. Genet is not free to remake the entire system of values that judges him (to do so would require stepping outside of this system, and doing this would leave significant parts of himself behind). He is free, however, to modify these values. He accomplishes this by actively and passionately choosing the identity society has assigned to him: to be a thief and a social deviant. This choice represents his fundamental project. By willfully accepting society’s judgment and celebrating a life of crime and homosexuality in his fiction and his memoirs, Genet asserts his freedom within the limits of his situation—he “creates himself” not ex nihilo but from the materials of his past. For Sartre, this makes Genet “one of the heroes of this age” (599). Genet represents one version of authenticity, for he affirms his freedom by direct engagement with his situation.
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY. Form of modern psychology developed primarily in Germany in the 1920s through the 1940s, based on the insight that perception operates by grasping meaningful wholes (Gestalten) rather than bits of sense data. According to Gestalt theorists, sense perception is informed by invariable laws—for example, of symmetry, contiguity, and color constancy—and these laws cause us to perceive things in terms of meaningful patterns and to assimilate new information to habitual categories. For example, a dotted line is perceived as continuous rather than fragmented, objects close to each other are perceived as a group, and a piece of white paper continues to be perceived as white even when cast in shadow. A further Gestalt principle is that of figure and ground. In normal perception, a perceived object (figure) stands out against a background that remains indistinct (ground). The primitive status of the figure–ground relationship undercuts the atomist assumption that perception originates in the reception of isolated sensory data.
Gestalt theory intersects with existentialism largely through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty was attracted to the Gestaltist critique of perceptual atomism as well as “logicism,” the assimilation of perception to intellectual processes. At the same time, he criticized the attempt to provide a causal account of perception in line with biological and psycho-physiological science. Like Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regarded causal accounts of human experience as reductive and naturalistic. Instead, he maintained that perception represents an “originary” level of meaning, a kind of “silent language” that cannot be reduced to either intellectual processes or physiological events. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, perception is inherently situational and subjective; the subject of perception is not the organism, as the Gestaltists believed, about which universal laws may be postulated, but the “lived body,” guided by emotional dispositions, intentions, and habits. Merleau-Ponty makes extensive use of the findings of Gestalt theory in both The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception. In the latter work, he refers particularly to the research of Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler.
GIACOMETTI, ALBERTO (1901–1966). Swiss modernist sculptor and painter. Associated with the surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, Giacometti befriended Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris in the early 1940s during the German occupation of France. In her memoirs, Beauvoir recalls the “deep bond of understanding between [Giacometti] and Sartre: they had both staked everything on one obsession—literature in Sartre’s case, art in Giacometti’s—and it was hard to decide which of them was more fanatical” (PL, 387). For Sartre, Giacometti’s approach to sculpting the human face recalled phenomenology: Both sought to capture the expressive meaning of the world “as it existed for other people . . . and . . . so . . . to avoid the pitfalls both of subjective idealism and pseudo-objectivity” (PL, 387–388). Giacometti’s tortured, elongated sculptures of the human form were often characterized as “existentialist” in that they expressed a mood of anxiety and alienation.
GIDE, ANDRÉ (1869–1951). French novelist, essayist, and diarist. Gide’s lucid prose style and his interest in issues of human freedom, social conformity, and individuality were influential on the literary endeavors of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Gide’s 1914 novel Les caves du Vatican (The Vatican Swindle) introduced the idea of the “gratuitous act,” an act that is purely unmotivated and inexplicable. For no apparent reason, the novel’s protagonist pushes a complete stranger to his death from a moving train. Gide’s notion of the gratuitous act may have provided a model for Camus in his novel The Stranger, whose protagonist also murders a man for no apparent reason. Gide published a collection of critical essays on Fyodor Dostoevsky and helped to introduce Dostoyevsky’s work to the French public. In the 1930s, appalled by the exploitation of African workers by French colonial corporations, he became a communist. A trip to the Soviet Union in 1936, however, changed his mind, and Gide published his criticisms of the Soviet system in Return from the U.S.S.R. (1936), the first book by a French intellectual of the Left to repudiate communism. In 1947, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
GINSBERG, ALLEN. See BEAT MOVEMENT.
GOD. See CHRISTIANITY; EXISTENTIAL THEOLOGY; KIERKEGAARD, SØREN; NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH; RELIGIOUS EXISTENTIALISM.
“GOD IS DEAD.” See DEATH OF GOD.
GRÉCO, JULIETTE. French pop singer associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist movement in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s. Dark-haired and dramatic, Gréco was the reigning diva of the nightclubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés for several years. Because she knew Sartre (he had written a song for her, “La Rue des Blancs-Manteaux”) and Simone de Beauvoir, she was often misidentified by the press as an “existentialist,” lending credence to the myth that existentialism was a kind of bohemianism. As commentator David Cooper observes, Gréco was the embodiment of the café existentialist: “Film of Juliette Gréco singing in the late 1940s gives an idea of the chic appeal which feigned ennui and despair apparently had for young Parisians of the time. Few of them, presumably, waded through the six hundred pages of Being and Nothingness, and their interpretation of existentialist freedom as a license to act as unconventionally as possible . . . was a complete distortion of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s notion” (Cooper, 12).
GREEKS. See HELLENISM.
GRENE, MARJORIE (1910– ). American philosopher and early interpreter of existentialism. As an exchange student in Germany in the early 1930s, Grene attended the lectures of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Her 1948 book, Introduction to Existentialism (originally entitled Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism), was among the first and most philosophically astute discussions of existentialist philosophy by an American philosopher. Grene went on to write a book on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and on the thought of Heidegger.
GUILT. An existentialist conception of guilt is tied to the notion of existential responsibility: To be guilty is not primarily to “owe something” to others but to be aware that one is responsible for oneself. Alternately, it is to be aware that one must exist without external foundation or cause, that is, that one is free. Martin Heidegger linked various psychological and religious manifestations of guilt to the fundamental “nullity” of existence itself. Existence is “guilty” in that it lacks a metaphysical foundation or essence. True existential guilt thus has nothing to do with the judgment of others; it is a matter of owning up to one’s own freedom.
Karl Jaspers was the sole existentialist to apply a philosophical conception of guilt to historical circumstances. In The Question of German Guilt (1946), Jaspers examined the issue of the collective guilt of Germans for the actions of the Nazi government during World War II.
GURVITCH, GEORGE (1894–1965). Russian-born French sociologist. Gurvitch’s 1930 book Tendences actuelles de la pensee allemande (Contemporary Trends in German Thought) was among the first works to introduce French philosophers to the thought of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were both familiar with Gurvitch’s work.
GURWITSCH, ARON (1901–1973). Lithuanian-born American philosopher and phenomenologist. Gurwitsch was a leading student of Edmund Husserl in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was also well-versed in Gestalt psychology, and his original work combined the findings of Gestalt theory with Husserlian phenomenology. As a Jew, Gurwitsch was forced to abandon his studies in Germany in 1933. He fled to France, where he became a respected scholar and teacher of Husserlian phenomenology from 1933 to 1939. While in Paris he befriended Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was already familiar with his work, and Merleau-Ponty attended Gurwitsch’s lectures on phenomeonology and Gestalt psychology. Gurwitsch, who had conducted research in Germany with the psychologists Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein on deficits in abstraction and language, communicated to Merleau-Ponty unpublished observations on Goldstein’s famous brain-injured patient “Schneider,” material that Merleau-Ponty made use of in Phenomenology of Perception. Gurwitsch was also familiar with Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological study of consciousness, The Transcendence of the Ego, and he was the first to publish an article on Sartre’s philosophy in English, “A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research I [1941]: 325–338). In 1940, Gurwitsch immigrated to the United States, where he held a variety of academic positions before finding a permanent post at the New School for Social Research in New York. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1946. His works include The Field of Consciousness (1964) and Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (1966).