Before The Existentialists began recording their philosophies,
several writers had already explored the absurdity of life and the inherent
difficulties of free will. John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Mephisto in Faust, and Dostoevsky’s collection of troubled anti-heroes are the literary embodiments of free will. Milton’s Satan is almost admirable for his unwillingness to serve in Heaven and accepting his resulting role. Faust is an archetype; he is the scientist willing to trade his soul for knowledge of absolute truths. Both of these characters represent the existential ideal: they accept their fates, however absurd, in return for a form of freedom.
These writers suggest some existential ideals, but
predate the label. In the case of Dostoevsky, it can be debated whether or not he was among The Existentialists. Regardless, he is the author of the definitive Christian existentialist poem, The
Grand Inquisitor. This one poem explains the difficulties of faith and freedom better than Nietzsche or Kierkegaard ever did.
Individuals influential to existentialism:
What Came Before
While knowledge and understanding are forever evolving, there are periods of major upheaval and disruption when major advances occur. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ushered in revolutionary theories in science and philosophy, creating a foundation for the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century. The advancements in science brought forth a realization that the universe is far more complex than was previously imagined.
Blaise Pascal, writing at the time of the emergence of this transformed world-view in the late 1650s, says that ‘The eternal silence of infinite spaces fills me with dread.’ That is, knowledge of the infinite, open universe of Copernicus and Galileo without meaning or final purpose, inspire sheer anxiety when one turns to the question of wisdom.
— Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction; Simon Critchley, p. 6
One of the identifying traits of Continental philosophy
is its self-reflective view of history. The Historical
Context of existentialism, for example, is explored (in detail) by the philosophers themselves in various works.
The idea of writing the history of philosophy with a systematic, argumentative
intent has been a very common way of proceeding in the Continental tradition
since Hegel’s 1807 masterpiece, Phenomenology
of Spirit, which unifies both approaches. One can also find the same approach employed in more contemporary work, such as Jürgen Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), and Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967). It is much less common in the Anglo-American tradition.
— Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction; Critchley, p. 32
Can’t Begin without Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) might be the most influential
figure in Western philosophy. Kant is the subject of numerous critiques,
placing him in the company of such figures as Socrates, Aristotle, and
Plato. Simon Critchley correctly points out that many scholars trace existentialism
to Edmund Husserl, but understanding Kant is essential to reading any modern philosophical work.
…20th-century developments in Continental philosophy are largely
unintelligible without reference to their 19th-century precursors, especially
Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. This is particularly the case with French
philosophy since the 1930s, which might well be described in terms of
a series of returns to Hegel…, Nietzsche… , or Marx….
— Continental Philosophy: A Very
Short Introduction; Critchley, p. 16
According to Critchley, the differences can be traced
to which Kant work a philosopher emphasizes: the First
Critique or Critique of Pure Reason (1781) or the Third
Critique or Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). The First Critique emphasizes epistemology, the pursuit of logic and knowledge. In this light, the First Critique becomes foundational within analytic traditions. The work offers a philosophy associated with, and commenting on, the scientific impulse of the Enlightenment.
Read in this light, Kant’s major philosophical contribution is to epistemology
and, by implication, philosophy of science. Indeed, this was how he was
overwhelmingly read by the school of Neo-Kantianism that dominated German
and French academic philosophy between 1890 and the late 1920s. It was
this epistemological reading of Kant in the work of Peter Strawson and
others that dominated the Anglo-American reception of Kant until fairly
recently.
— Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction; Critchley, p. 19
The Third Critique addresses how one understands knowledge through experience. This move towards questions of experience foreshadowed such movements and methods as phenomenology. Those philosophers emphasizing the Third Critique ask questions about human nature. How does being human affect how we come to understand knowledge?
Kant attempts
to construct a bridge between the faculties of the understanding (the domain
of epistemology whose concern is knowledge of nature) and reason (the domain
of ethics whose concern is freedom), through a critique of the faculty
of judgement… If one takes this route, then the burning issue of Kant’s
philosophy becomes the plausibility of the relation of pure and practical
reason, nature and freedom, or the unity of theory and practice… Arguably,
it is this route that Continental philosophy has followed ever since.
— Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction; Critchley, p. 19
The major historical figures in existentialism sought to
explore the same questions Kant asked.
Critchley, Simon. Continental
Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. [0192853597]