[97], Existential perspectives are also found in modern literature to varying degrees, especially since the 1920s. Existentialism is Humanism - UK Essays In the 1960s, Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason. "[20] For others, existentialism need not involve the rejection of God, but rather "examines mortal man's search for meaning in a meaningless universe," considering less "What is the good life?" The principal representatives of German existentialism in the 20th century were Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers; those of French personalistic existentialism were Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre; that of French phenomenology were Maurice Merleau-Ponty; that of Spanish existentialism was Jos Ortega y Gasset; that of Russian idealistic existentialism was Nikolay Berdyayev (who, however, lived half of his adult life in France); and that of Italian existentialism was Nicola Abbagnano. Many of the literary works of Kierkegaard, Beckett, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Ionesco, Miguel de Unamuno, Luigi Pirandello,[36][37][38][39] Sartre, Joseph Heller, and Camus contain descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of the world. Some have argued that existentialism has long been an element of European religious thought, even before the term came into use. The absurd contrasts with the claim that "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person. [92] Orson Welles's 1962 film The Trial, based upon Franz Kafka's book of the same name (Der Proze), is characteristic of both existentialist and absurdist themes in its depiction of a man (Joseph K.) arrested for a crime for which the charges are neither revealed to him nor to the reader. Such things as objectivity, rationalism, absolutism, and universalism have not been favoured at all. Nevertheless, the extent to which Heidegger should be considered an existentialist is debatable. Jaspers, a professor at the university of Heidelberg, was acquainted with Heidegger, who held a professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928. The setting is not the fairyland of the imagination, where poetry produces consummation, nor is the setting laid in England, and historical accuracy is not a concern. To live the life of the absurd means rejecting a life that finds or pursues specific meaning for man's existence since there is nothing to be discovered. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. The Paris-based existentialists had become famous.[78]. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom again. [27], Jonathan Webber interprets Sartre's usage of the term essence not in a modal fashion, i.e. For the conscious state of shame to be experienced, one has to become aware of oneself as an object of another look, proving a priori, that other minds exist. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.[122]. In English, it is often distinguished from its antecedent by being pronounced in its original French form, approximately "Ante-GN." "[109] The play also illustrates an attitude toward human experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can be reconciled only in the mind and art of the absurdist. It is thus opposed to most forms of idealism, such as those that stress Consciousness, Spirit, Reason, Idea, or Oversoul. That diversity was rooted, at least in part, in the diversity of sources on which existentialism draws.
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