The subject of this dictionary is the philosophy of human existence that flourished first in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and then in France in the decade following the end of World War II. The operative meaning of existentialism here is thus broader than it was around 1945, when the term first gained currency in France as a label for the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. However, it is considerably less broad than the view proposed by commentators in the 1950s and 1960s who, in an attempt to overcome Sartre’s hegemony, discovered the seeds of existentialism far and wide—in Shakespeare, Saint Augustine, and the Old Testament prophets. In this dictionary, existentialism is understood as a decidedly 20th-century phenomenon, though with roots in the 19th century. Effort has been made to understand the philosophy of existentialism, as all philosophies should be understood, as part of an ongoing intellectual tradition: an evolving history of problems, concepts, and arguments. To take one salient example, existentialism would not have been possible without a prior philosophical endeavor formulated by Edmund Husserl in the early 1900s called phenomenology. Without Husserl’s phenomenology, the philosophy of existence would have taken a radically different form. Its major theoretical statements, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, would perhaps never have been written.
Happily, the risk is no longer very great that readers will conflate existentialism with a postwar malaise, a godless nihilism, or a bohemian lifestyle, as detractors in the 1940s and 1950s frequently did. Still, it bears repeating that existentialism is first and foremost a type of philosophy, not a style of literature or an aesthetic attitude. While many French existentialists chose to express themselves through literature as well as philosophy, existentialist fiction was for the most part “the pursuit of philosophy by other means,” not an attempt at literary expression as an end in itself or an effort merely to épater les bourgeois.
The majority of entries in this dictionary concern the life and thought of eight major existentialists: Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus. Readers who consult entries on these eight figures will receive a fairly comprehensive overview of existentialist philosophy in the 20th century. Jaspers and Heidegger were the chief representatives of German “philosophy of existence,” while Buber was the foremost Jewish existentialist writer and thinker. Marcel, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty were the principal architects of French existentialism. Albert Camus, while he was not strictly speaking an existentialist, was and still often is linked to existentialism. Thus Camus is accorded coverage commensurate with his reputation and historical importance.
Significant attention as well is devoted to the Danish Christian writer Søren Kierkegaard, the chief 19th-century precursor of existentialism. Entries for many core existentialist concepts, including anxiety, authenticity and inauthenticity, choice, commitment, freedom, and responsibility, refer readers to Kierkegaard’s seminal formulation of these ideas and indicate, when appropriate, how his statements served as templates for future existentialist accounts. Entries are also dedicated to individual works by Kierkegaard, such as The Concept of Anxiety and Fear and Trembling, whose influence was particularly clear and important.
Friedrich Nietzsche is the second major 19th-century precursor of existentialism. Nietzsche’s influence on existentialism, while significant, is, however, more diffuse and harder to pinpoint. His concepts of the “death of God,” nihilism, the “Overman,” the “will to power,” and the “transvaluation of all values” cast a spell over most European intellectuals of the early 20th century, including many existentialists. Moreover, Nietzsche’s status as an existentialist, or protoexistentialist, philosopher is subject to debate (his status as an existentialist is addressed in the entry for him). When appropriate, the specific nature of Nietzsche’s influence is noted—for example, his understanding of “the death of God” and of European nihilism and how it is to be overcome. Many aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, though, are beyond the scope of this inquiry and are not treated in this dictionary.
I have tried to convey a sense of the diversity and richness of other philosophical currents that contributed to existentialism. Entries on philosophers and philosophical movements instrumental to the development of existentialism include those on Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx and Marxism, neo-Kantian philosophy, phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of life, and Max Scheler. A discussion of philosophy of existence explains the character and provenance of existentialist thought in Germany and France in the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the emergence of Sartre’s existentialism. I have also acknowledged important instances in which existentialism was exported to disciplines outside of philosophy. These developments are noted, inter alia, in entries on Rudolph Bultmann and Paul Tillich, theologians who developed the field of existential theology, as well as in a discussion of existential psychotherapy as practiced by the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts Medard Boss, Ludwig Binswanger, and Victor Frankl, among others. The relationship between existentialism and psychoanalysis is further assessed in entries on existential psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
A spectrum of the ideas referred to under the umbrella category “religious existentialism” (i.e., theistic existentialism) is conveyed through entries on Abraham, the absurd, Martin Buber, Catholicism, faith, Karl Jaspers, Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, and Franz Rosenzweig. Entries on Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Raymond Aron document thinkers whose concerns and careers paralleled and at times overlapped with those of existentialist philosophers. Fields in which existentialist influence has been more contingent and episodic, such as feminism and race theory, receive proportionally less attention. Readers interested in these areas may consult the sections devoted to them in the bibliography.
As a historical dictionary, this work is also attentive to the political and cultural contexts in which existentialism developed. Two of the most important political episodes are Martin Heidegger’s involvement with German National Socialism (see HEIDEGGER AND NAZISM) and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s relationship with Marxism and Communist polemics (see COMMUNISM; MARXISM; POLITICS). The reader is left to decide to what degree these episodes represent authentic instances of existential “commitment.” Entries devoted to World War I, World War II, Nazism, and the French Resistance help to fill in the historical background of existentialist philosophy.
As noted, in a way perhaps unrivaled since the dialogues of Plato, and staunchly opposed by Anglo-American philosophers of the period, existentialism was intimately linked with literary modes of expression. Individual works of fiction by existentialists are documented in entries on Sartre’s novel Nausea and his The Roads to Freedom trilogy, his plays No Exit and The Flies, and Beauvoir’s novel She Came to Stay. (Camus’s novel The Stranger, widely considered a classic of existentialist fiction, is discussed under philosophy of the absurd. Both The Stranger and The Plague are discussed in the entry for Camus.) Other literary and artistic topics include Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, existentialist literature, surrealism, theater of the absurd, and jazz.
Critics of existentialism are accounted for in entries for logical positivism (Rudolph Carnap and A. J. Ayer), Theodor Adorno, Karl Löwith, and Georg Lukács, among others. Entries devoted to important scholars of the subject, especially authors of early commentaries that first brought the idea to the attention of American readers in the 1940s and 1950s, include those for William Barrett, Wilfred Desan, Marjorie Grene, Walter Kaufmann, Paul Tillich, and Jean Wahl, as well as for those who further developed these ideas in the 1960s and 1970s, such as John Macquarrie and Frederick Olafson (Olafson’s work is discussed under ethical voluntarism). Among recent commentators, David E. Cooper is singled out for discussion in the dictionary as well as at the end of the introduction.
Finally, I have felt obligated to acknowledge certain popular myths and attitudes associated with existentialism, however erroneous. Some of the more sensationalized aspects of postwar French existentialism are documented in entries on Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus; on figures associated with Sartre’s circle like Juliette Grèco and Boris Vian; and on the café existentialists and places they haunted in Paris in the late 1940s—Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Café de Flore, and the Café les Deux Magots. Popular misconceptions of existentialism are also discussed in the introduction.
Perhaps the greatest interpretive challenge in composing The A to Z of Existentialism has been to assign the concept of existentialism an extension broad enough to capture its varied expressions and yet narrow enough to retain its coherence as a form of philosophy. Commentators long ago abandoned the idea that existentialism can be understood historically as a single “school” or “movement.” Nonetheless, the question remains of how one is to characterize the unity of existentialist philosophy. I have briefly suggested how this may be done in the dictionary entry for existence and in the introduction. It is hoped that, by consulting the entries on core existentialist concepts, such as alienation, anxiety, authenticity and inauthenticity, commitment, freedom, and responsibility, as well as on the major existentialists, readers will grasp for themselves how the unity of the philosophy of existence (i.e., existentialism) may plausibly be construed.