Existentialism

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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information

The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism

Existentialism exerts a continuing fascination on students of philosophy and general readers. As a philosophical phenomenon, though, it is often poorly understood as a form of radical subjectivism that turns its back on reason and argu- mentation and possesses all the liabilities of philosophical idealism but without any idealistic conceptual clarity. In this volume of original essays, the first to be devoted exclu- sively to existentialism in over forty years, a team of distinguished commentators discusses the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir and shows how their focus on existence provides a compel- ling perspective on contemporary issues in moral psychology and philosophy of mind, language, and history. A further sequence of chapters examines the influence of existential ideas beyond philosophy, in literature, religion, politics, and psychiatry. The volume offers a rich and comprehensive assessment of the continuing vitality of existentialism as a philosophical movement and a cultural phenomenon.

steven crowell is Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor at Rice University. He is the author of Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001), and the editor of The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson (1995), and, with Jeff Malpas, of Transcendental Heidegger (2007).

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OTHER VOLUMES IN THE SERIES OF CAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS ABELARD Edited by JEFFREY E. BROWER and KEVIN GUILFOY ADORNO Edited by THOMAS HUHN ANCIENT SCEPTICISM Edited by RICHARD BETT ANSELM Edited by BRIAN DAVIES and BRIAN LEFTOW AQUINAS Edited by NORMAN KRETZMANN and ELEONORE STUMP ARABIC PHILOSOPHY Edited by PETER ADAMSON and RICHARD C. TAYLOR HANNAH ARENDT Edited by DANA VILLA ARISTOTLE Edited by JONATHAN BARNES ATHEISM Edited by MICHAEL MARTIN AUGUSTINE Edited by ELEONORE STUMP and NORMAN KRETZMANN BACON Edited by MARKKU PELTONEN BERKELEY Edited by KENNETH P. WINKLER BOETHIUS Edited by JOHN MARENBOM BRENTANO Edited by DALE JACQUETTE CARNAP Edited by MICHAEL FRIEDMAN CONSTANT Edited by HELENA ROSENBLATT CRITICAL THEORY Edited by FRED RUSH DARWIN 2nd edition Edited by JONATHAN HODGE and GREGORY RADICK SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Edited by CLAUDIA CARD DESCARTES Edited by JOHN COTTINGHAM DEWEY Edited by MOLLY COCHRAN DUNS SCOTUS Edited by THOMAS WILLIAMS EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY Edited by A. A. LONG EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY Edited by DONALD RUTHERFORD EPICUREANISM Edited by JAMES WARREN EXISTENTIALISM Edited by STEVEN CROWELL FEMINISM IN PHILOSOPHY Edited by MIRANDA FRICKER and JENNIFER HORNSBY FOUCAULT 2nd edition Edited by GARY GUTTING FREGE Edited by THOMAS RICKETTS and MICHAEL POTTER FREUD Edited by JEROME NEU Continued at the back of the book

The Cambridge Companion to EXISTENTIALISM

Edited by

Steven Crowell Rice University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK

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First published 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data the Cambridge companion to existentialism / edited by Steven Crowell, Rice University, Houston. pages cm. – (Cambridge companions to philosophy) includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-51334-0 (hardback) – isbn 978-0-521-73278-9 (paperback) 1. Existentialism. i. Crowell, Steven Galt, editor of compilation. b819.c28 2012 142’.78–dc23 2011044362

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CONTENTS

List of contributors page ix

I Introduction 1 Existentialism and its legacy 3 Steven Crowell

II Existentialism in Historical Perspective 2 Existentialism as a philosophical movement 27 David E. Cooper 3 Existentialism as a cultural movement 50 William McBride

III Major Existentialist Philosophers 4 Kierkegaard’s single individual and the point of indirect communication 73 Alastair Hannay 5 “What a monster then is man”: Pascal and Kierkegaard on being a contradictory self and what to do about it 96 Hubert L. Dreyfus 6 nietzsche: after the death of God 111 Richard Schacht 7 nietzsche: selfhood, creativity, and philosophy 137 Lawrence J. Hatab

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viii CONTENTS

8 Heidegger: the existential analytic of Dasein 158 William Blattner 9 the antinomy of being: Heidegger’s critique of humanism 178 Karsten Harries 10 sartre’s existentialism and the nature of consciousness 199 Steven Crowell 11 Political existentialism: the career of Sartre’s political thought 227 Thomas R. Flynn 12 simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism: freedom and ambiguity in the human world 252 Kristana Arp 13 merleau-Ponty on body, flesh, and visibility 274 Taylor Carman

IV The Reach of Existential Philosophy 14 Existentialism as literature 291 Jeff Malpas 15 Existentialism and religion 322 Merold Westphal 16 Racism is a system: how existentialism became dialectical in Fanon and Sartre 342 Robert Bernasconi 17 Existential phenomenology, psychiatric illness, and the death of possibilities 361 Matthew Ratcliffe and Matthew Broome Bibliography 383 Index 407

Contributors

KRISTANA ARP is Professor of Philosophy at Long Island University, Brooklyn, and the author of The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics (2001).

ROBERT BERNASCONI is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of two books on Heidegger and of How to Read Sartre (2006). He is co-editor with Simon Critchley of The Cambridge Companion to Emmanuel Levinas (2002) and with Jonathan Judaken of the forthcoming Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context. He is also the author of numerous articles in the critical philosophy of race and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy.

WILLIAM BLATTNER is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and the author of Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide (2006) and Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (1999).

MATTHEW BROOME is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Warwick and Consultant Psychiatrist, Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership Trust, UK. He is also Chair of the Philosophy Special Interest Group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Together with Lisa Bortolotti, Broome edited Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives (2009) and is currently co-editing The Maudsley Reader in Phenomenological Psychiatry with colleagues from the Maudsley Philosophy Group.

x list of Contributors

TAYLOR CARMAN is Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (2004) and author of Heidegger’s Analytic (2003) and Merleau-Ponty (2008).

DAVID E. COOPER is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Durham University, UK. His many books include Existentialism: A Reconstruction (1990, 1999); World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction (1995, 2002); and The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility and Mystery (2003). He is co-editor of Philosophy: The Classic Readings (2009).

STEVEN CROWELL is Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. He is the author of Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology (2001), and editor, with Jeff Malpas, of Transcendental Heidegger (2007). Crowell authored the article on “Existentialism” for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and has served as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Currently he is editor of Husserl Studies.

HUBERT l. DREYFUS is Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include: What Computers (Still) Can’t Do (1992); Being-in-the- World: A Commentary on Division i of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1991); Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (with Stuart Dreyfus,1986); On the Internet (2001, 2009); and most recently, with Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (2011). Dreyfus has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

THOMAS R. FLYNN is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He is the author of Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (1984); Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, vol. i, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History, vol. ii, A Poststructuralist Mapping

list of contributors xi

of History (1997); and Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (2006).

ALASTAIR HANNAY is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of California (Berkeley and San Diego) and the University of Stockholm. He was for many years editor of Inquiry and is author of Mental Images – A Defence (1971, 2002); Kierkegaard (1982, 1999); Human Consciousness (1990); Kierkegaard: A Biography (2001); Kierkegaard and Philosophy (2003); and On the Public (2006). He has translated several of Kierkegaard’s works and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh as well a Member of both the Royal Norwegian Scientific Society of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

KARSTEN HARRIES is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including The Meaning of Modern Art (1968); The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism (1983); The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997); Infinity and Perspective (2001); Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” (2009); Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or (2010); and the forthcoming Wahrheit: Die Architektur der Welt.

LAWRENCE J. HATAB is Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University. His books include A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (1995); Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy (2000); Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence (2005); and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: An Introduction (2008).

WILLIAM McBRIDE is Arthur G. Hansen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, and Director of its interdiscip- linary Ph.D. program in philosophy. He is currently President of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) and was co-founder and first director of the North American Sartre Society, past president of the North American Society for Social Philosophy and of the Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française.

xii list of Contributors

He has written, edited, or co-edited nineteen books, including Sartre’s Political Theory (1991) and the eight-volume edited essay collection entitled Sartre and Existentialism (1997).

JEFF MALPAS is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Among many other works, he is the author of Place and Experience (1999) and Heidegger’s Topology (2006), and is the editor of Dialogues with Davidson (2011).

MATTHEW RATCLIFFE is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, UK. He is author of Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology (2008); Theory of Mind and Simulation (2007); and Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (2008).

RICHARD SCHACHT is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Emeritus) at the University of Illinois. He has written extensively on Nietzsche and other figures and developments in the post-Kantian interpretive tradition. His books include Nietzsche (1983); Making Sense of Nietzsche (1995); Hegel and After (1975); Alienation (1970); The Future of Alienation (1994); and Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring (2004, with Philip Kitcher). He has also edited several volumes on Nietzsche, including Nietzsche’s Postmoralism (2000) and Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (1994).

MEROLD WESTPHAL is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He has served as President of the Hegel Society of America and of the Søren Kierkegaard Society and as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. He is the author of many books, including History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1982); Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1987); Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1996); God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (1984); Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: An Essay on God and the Soul (2004); and Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (2008).