Corrigendum — vol. I
a brief introduction · pamphlet nº 7

EXISTENTIALISM

• • •
freedom — anxiety — the abyss
1844 – 1980

I. The Question

Not “what is the world?”

but “what shall I do with my life?”

Existentialism turns philosophy inward. The question is no longer the architecture of the cosmos, nor the categories of pure reason — but the small, urgent, first-person predicament of being someone, in a world that does not, by itself, tell us what to be.

II. The Father

1813 — 1855

Søren
Kierkegaard

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

  • The leap of faith. Reason runs out before God; what remains is a wager taken by the whole self.
  • Subjective truth. The truth that matters is the truth one lives — passionately, in fear and trembling.
  • Anxiety (Angst). The vertigo we feel before our own infinite possibility.
  • Stages on life’s way: aesthetic → ethical → religious.

III. The Hammer

1844 — 1900

Friedrich
Nietzsche

“God is dead. And we have killed him.”

  • The death of God. Not a triumph — a calamity. The old values lose their ground.
  • Will to power. Life is the drive to grow, to overcome, to create.
  • Eternal recurrence. Could you bear to live this life, in every detail, infinitely many times?
  • The Übermensch. One who invents new values after the old gods fall.

IV. The Forester

1889 — 1976

Martin
Heidegger

“We are the beings for whom Being is a question.”

  • Being-toward-death. Mortality is not an event at the end — it is the horizon that makes a life mine.
  • Thrownness (Geworfenheit). We arrive in a world we did not choose, already underway.
  • The question of Being. Western philosophy forgot it; Heidegger reopens it.
  • Authenticity. Owning the life one has been thrown into.

V. The Café

1905 — 1980

Jean-Paul
Sartre

“We are condemned to be free.”

  • Existence precedes essence. First we are; only then do we make ourselves something.
  • Bad faith (mauvaise foi). Pretending we are not free, hiding behind roles and the gaze of others.
  • Radical freedom. No alibi — not God, not nature, not nation — can excuse us from choosing.
  • The Look. The other’s gaze fixes me, makes me an object.

VI. The Companion, the Equal

1908 — 1986

Simone de
Beauvoir

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

  • The Second Sex (1949). Founding text of modern feminism — and an existential treatise on becoming.
  • Situated freedom. Freedom is real, but always situated in a body, a culture, a history.
  • Woman as Other. Defined relative to man, denied the role of subject.
  • The ethics of ambiguity. To be human is to be both freedom and facticity at once.

VII. The Absurd

1913 — 1960

Albert
Camus

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

  • The absurd. The collision of human longing for meaning with the silence of the world.
  • Sisyphus. The stone always rolls back. The task is endless. And yet.
  • Revolt, not despair. To live the absurd is to refuse both suicide and false hope.
  • Lucidity. See clearly — and live anyway.
“
Man is nothing else
but what he
makes of himself.
— Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946

VIII. What it gave us

The contributions.

  • A phenomenology of mood. Anxiety, boredom, nausea, dread — not weaknesses, but disclosures of how things are.
  • Authenticity. A new ethical ideal: to live as the one whose life this actually is.
  • The self as a project. Not a fixed essence, but a long, recursive act of self-making.
  • The dignity of the first person. Philosophy spoken in the voice of someone, somewhere, choosing.
• • •

IX. Where it fails

The critiques.

  • Too individualistic. The lone subject choosing in a void — a fiction. We are always already entangled.
  • Blind to structures. Marxists object: class, capital and history shape what we can choose. (Beauvoir partly answers this.)
  • Vague on action. Authenticity tells me to choose — not what to choose.
  • Bourgeois melancholy? A philosophy with the leisure to feel its own anxiety.

X. After the war, after the cafe

The legacy.

  • Existential therapy. Yalom, May, Frankl — meaning, mortality, freedom and isolation as core clinical concerns.
  • Agency in psychology. Self-determination, narrative identity, the self as project.
  • Modernist literature. Beckett, Kafka (read backwards), Murdoch, Bellow, Ellison — the absurd as a literary key.
  • Everyday vocabulary. “Authentic,” “bad faith,” “the absurd” — all out walking around now.
• • •

Coda

Further reading.

  • Kierkegaard — Fear and Trembling (1843)
  • Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5)
  • Heidegger — Being and Time (1927)
  • Sartre — Being and Nothingness (1943); Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)
  • Beauvoir — The Second Sex (1949); The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
  • Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus (1942); The Stranger (1942)

On screen.

— FIN —
01/13
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