Existentialism

Outline of the Paper

The paper discusses that existentialism is a 19th and 20th Century philosophy which holds that the path to moral redemption consists in self-reflection, individual angst and individual moral judgment; sort of an alienated European's Buddhism. Criticism of existentialism from both traditional moral codes and outright radicals states that existentialists themselves are not very happy people, they seem to be depressed all the time and never seem to get any better.

Introduction

My theory is that people who never seem to be contended tend to become existentialists instead of the other way around. Existentialism is a quasi-viable 'prozac' philosophy which depressed people invented in the hopes of redeeming themselves (Arendt, 33-44).

Existentialism

The people who created the philosophy of existentialism tended to be the same people who became incredibly depressed or faced an uncertain future; middle-class intellectuals in a world spiraling out of control towards it's singular destruction. Existentialism is not the cause of depression but merely a coping skill created by the people who realize the pain of the modern world the most; powerless intellectuals trying to make a better world (Arendt, 33-44).

It is clear even from a cursory glance at existential philosophy that these are not happy people, Sartre goes out and simply says it “Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness and dies by accident”. Friedrich Nietzsche similarly says “What good is my happiness? It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!” (Stokes, 37-41) The inevitable question is whether existentialism depresses people or whether depressed people become existentialists (Arendt, 22-21).

I believe that existentialism is essentially the child of it's time; as all philosophies are. The chief standard-bearers for existentialist thought were bourgeois, quasi-liberal intellectuals (Nietzsche, Sartre, Kirkegaard). In the 19th and 20th Century these bourgeois intellectuals witnessed their loss of power to the 'rabble' and the 'mob' (Totalitarianism, yellow journalism) and watched ideologies which demanded total conformity reduce their countrymen to the status of variables in a spreadsheet (Eugenics, Marxism); they watched in short the complete destruction and corruption of the liberal intellectual's traditional value system (Kantian ethics, Christianity, culture, art). To fill this void in the souls of humanity these intellectuals created existentialism; a philosophy that tried to combine Western Religion (redemption, individual choice) with Eastern Religion (moral law, eternal recurrence) and atheism (a world without God, moral questioning). This would be a tall order indeed; especially after the collapse of all previous value systems in Hiroshima and Auschwitz (Arendt, 22-21).

In the 20th Century the decline of the middle class (Marx's petty bourgeois and favourite antagonist) had many unique and apparently contradictory causes. If the 19th Century was the century of the Bourgeois (Napoleon, Disraeli, The French Revolution was instigated by bourgeois intellectuals) than the early 20th Century was the era of the mob (fascism, Marxism, anti-intellectual populism) no less an authority on mob politics than Hitler said “The Petit Bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the communist always will” (Arendt, 22-21).

In all ...