Existentialism To some, existentialism is a bleak philosophical worldview. To others, it’s the only sane solution to a seemingly insane world. Existentialism’s best known proponent is Jean-Paul Sartre, who put a lot of very basic ideas into equally clever phrases and hence made a celebrity out of himself. And this exemplifies what existentialism is all about: The creation of meaning and purpose from a human world said to be meaningless and uprooted from nature. According to Sartre, one creates unique meaning and purpose out of absurdity by choosing to make commitments to an ideal or movement deemed worthwhile. Unlike animals supposedly bound by stimulus and response, Sartre says our “gap of nothingness” that lies between our present and our past means we are able to choose and thus we’re “condemned to be free.” Existentialism was in vogue in the late 1950’s and 1960’s among beatniks, hippies, journalists and academics. As David Bowie rather amusingly puts it in “Join the gang” (1967):
Let me introduce you to the gang
Johnny plays the sitar, he’s an existentialist
Once he had a name, now he plays our game
You won’t feel so good now that you’ve joined the gang
Sartre’s stardom in the halls of academe was generally succeeded by Karl Marx in the 1970’s, and then by the postmoderns in the 1980’s, to be followed by the likes of Wittgenstein and Noam Chomsky in the 1990’s. Other famous existentialists include Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) and Albert Camus (1913-60). » Bad Faith, Fromm (Erich), Postmodernism, Poststructuralism
On the World Wide Web:
- Sartre Quotes at Thinkexist.com
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