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Introduction to Existentialism by Marjorie Grene; University of Chicago Press, 1959
- Chapter One: Why Existentialism?
- Chapter Two: SØren Kierkegaard: The Self Against the System
- Chapter Three: Sartre and Heidegger: The Free Resolve
- Chapter Four: Sartre and Heidegger: The Self and Other Selves
- Chapter Five: French Existentialism and Politics: The New Revolutionary
- Chapter Six: Jaspers and Marcel: The New Revelation
* Theology: Existence is prior to essence in St. Thomas.
Existentialism by Mary Warnock; Oxford University Press, 1970
1. Ethical Origins: Søren Kierkegaard; Friedrich Nietzsche - 2: Edmund Husserl - 3: Martin Heidegger - 4: Maurice Merleau-Ponty - 5: Jean-Paul Sartre (1)(2)
* Camus (The Possessed based on Dostoevsky).
So where does Existentialism stand today? It undoubtedly has a place in the history of ideas. Nietzsche is perhaps now most widely recognized as the giant brooding over a wide and diverse area of thought. But it remains true that, in the Gallic version of Existentialism, Sartre is the central figure, and that he cannot be understood without some understanding of the effect that phenomenology had on him. The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology for May 1970 (vol. 1, no. 2) was an issue devoted to Sartre, to celebrate his 65th birthday. There appeared in it, for the first time in English, a short article he had written in 1939 on the fundamental ideas of Husserl. It expresses his excitement and sense of deliverance at the rejection by Husserl of the 'inner life'. The world is real, and humans are part of that world. Things really have such characteristics as being disgusting or being lovable: it is not a mere projection onto the natural world of something within ourselves. He ends the article with these words: 'everything is finally outside, everything, even ourselves. It is not in some hidingplace that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man among men.' This vision was never entirely lost, and it is because it remained that, when, having encountered Marxism, he became interested in the truth of history, Sartre had to attempt to reconcile the inevitability of material change with the dynamic free agency of the human 'self'.
Finally, I remarked (p. 130) that French intellectual life was prone to crazes. This has certainly been borne out in the last twenty-five years. Existentialism was succeeded by structuralism, then post-structuralism and post-modernism. Some people have seen Sartre as the precursor of these anthropological and essentially relativist theories. I do not think this is so. His insistence that there is a unity and a truth in history to be sought as a goal sets him entirely apart both from the belief that cultures are engaged in different 'language games' and that these 'games' are incommensurable (see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition ( Manchester, 1984)); and from the view, frequently expressed by Derrida, that there is nothing but words: no world to which the words apply. Such a view would imply that any story told as history was as good as any other, and this Sartre never believed. If Existentialism is the precursor of Derrida, then it is the Existentialism of Heidegger, not of Sartre; and this I would not deny.
M.W. 1996
2005 & After
[ Fall 2007 Theatre UAF ]
No Exit and Three Other Plays (Vintage International) (Paperback) 0679725164
No Exit sparknotes
HUIS CLOS PARTIE DEUX (No Exit, Act II) Todd Levin
No Exit From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[ ... ]
Beckett, Absurd and Existential
Thinkers & Platonic Girls (Gallery)
... Nietzsche Page? Nietzsche states that his concept of ressentiment has its roots in a "slave revolt" of ancient Jews, which overturned the Greek aristocratic idea... [ SELF page + Marxism ]
... [ 1 ] No Exit : Sartre vs. Camus
Postmodern Existentialism : Stoppard
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theatre theory * 
