LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Existentialism
built 784 days ago
Existentialism is a philosophical movement which claims that individual human beings have full responsibility for creating the meanings of their own lives. It is a reaction against more traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and empiricism, which sought to discover an ultimate order in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world. The movement had its origins in the 19th century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and was prevalent in Continental philosophy. In the 1940s and 1950s, French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus wrote scholarly and fictional works that helped to popularize themes associated with existentialism: "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, [and] nothingness". [1]
Source:
Existentialism is a philosophical and literary movement that flourished primarily during the two decades after World War II, although it had been developing during the previous two decades, and continued to be influential in later years. Jean-Paul Sartre became its most central and well-known figure. His philosophical writings, as well as his numerous plays and novels, did much to spread Existentialist thinking, and to make Existentialism one of the schools of thought with which the reading public was more or less familiar. Other well-known philosophical and literary writers associated with the movement were Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Miguel de Unamuno. Søren Kierkegaard, Fjodor Dostoyevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche are usually added to the list as important 19th century forerunners.
Source:
Existentialism has an unusual relationship with different philosophical systems. Most of the time a person will adhere to one system or another, but not both - ... a person might be a Logical Positivist or a Pragmatist, but not both. Existentialism, however, can coexist with many different philosophies.
Source:
Starting from these bases, Existentialism can take diverse and contrasting directions. It can insist on the transcendence of Being with respect to existence, and, by holding this transcendence to be the origin or foundation of existence, it can ... assume a theistic form. On the other hand, it can hold that human existence, posing itself as a problem, projects itself with absolute freedom, creating itself by itself, thus assuming to itself the function of God. As such, Existentialism presents itself as a radical atheism. Or it may insist on the finitude of human existence—i.e., on the limits inherent in its possibilities of projection and choice. As such, Existentialism presents itself as a humanism.
Source:
Would Existentialism consistently dictate a certain political attitude? One would hardly think so if "all is permitted," but one need not appeal to logic, only to another conspicuous Existentialist figure, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Both Sartre and Heidegger were disciples of the founder of Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and Sartre himself, somewhat younger, was then influenced by Heidegger. The enduring, embarrassing detail about Heidegger... is that he enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party and somehow never got around to explaining just why he had made that mistake or why, for that matter, the Nazi Party was really unworthy of his attention. Indeed, until the end of his life, it always sounded like he was unable to distinguish what it was about the Nazis that was bad, and in fact Naziism followed much more coherently from Heidegger's thought than Marxism ever did from Sartre's. That is because, as a true Existentialist, Heidegger did not impose any timeless moral judgments, let alone liberal or democratic ones, on history.
Source:
With respect to the first point, that existence is particular, Existentialism is opposed to any doctrine that views man as the manifestation of an absolute or of an infinite substance. It is ... opposed to most forms of Idealism, such as those that stress Consciousness, Spirit, Reason, Idea, or Oversoul. Secondly, it is opposed to any doctrine that sees in man some given and complete reality that must be resolved into its elements in order to be known or contemplated. It is thus opposed to any form of objectivism or scientism since these stress the crass reality of external fact. Thirdly, Existentialism is opposed to any form of necessitarianism; for existence is constituted by possibilities from among which man may choose and through which he can project himself. And, finally, with respect to the fourth point, Existentialism is opposed to any solipsism (holding that I alone exist) or any epistemological Idealism (holding that the objects of knowledge are mental), because existence, which is the relationship with other beings, always extends beyond itself, toward the being of these entities; it is, so to speak, transcendence.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Existentialism