How unfortunate to have forgotten the curator to that museum of ideas. I once was young. Concepts all too often were inchoate. Kaufmann directed my stumbling progress through these choppy waters. I had a long hooded green coat then. I walked around the university brooding -- largely for effect. My focus shifted from social justice to existential peril.I'd like to beat that guy's ass.What emerged was a lifelong appreciation of Hamlet. I'm now curious if further biases leaped upon me with my dazzled attentions elsewhere.

Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

So there's this group of guys (and women too, though you won’t find them here) who we call the existentialists, and their main similarity is that they... had very little in common and didn't like each other much. Seriously, Kaufmann tells us on the first page that "[e]xistentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy. . . a bewildered outsider might well conclude that the only thing [these thinkers] have in common is a marked aversion for each other." Well fine, we know how touchy intellectual types can be about labels, but surely they're more alike than diff—     Certainly, existentialism is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets. The three writers who appear invariably on every list of "existentialists"—Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre—are not in agreement on essentials. Such alleged precursors as Pascal and Kierkegaard differed from all three men by being dedicated Christians. . . If, as is often done, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are included in the fold, we must make room for an impassioned anti-Christian and an even more fanatical Greek-Orthodox Russian imperialist. By the time we consider adding Rilke, Kafka, and Camus, it becomes plain that one essential feature shared by all these men is their perfervid individualism.  he argued for the importance of action, but refused to take meaningful action when it mattered most; he taught that philosophy should be lived rather than merely argued about in schools, but is notorious for his indirectness and obscurity; he preached the transcendence of everyday existence, but is all but inaccessible without a PhD. If it weren’t for his profound influence on Sartre, I’d discount him entirely. Call me irrational if you’d like; Heidegger himself would tell you that rationality is deceptive.   Jean-Paul Sartre (French, 1905 - 1980)  And finally we arrive at Sartre, the only existentialist in this list to claim the title and the one primarily responsible—along with his intellectual and romantic partner Simone de Beauvoir, whom Kaufmann never so much as mentions—for codifying its key concepts. He first gained prominence with the publication of  Being and Nothingness , a sort of spiritual sequel to Heidegger’s  Being and Time , and one of the complaints often lodged against him is that he did little more than reformulate the ideas of the German thinker. But really Sartre was a kind of anti-Heidegger, in the same way that Nietzsche was the anti-Kierkegaard. While Heidegger was cozying up to the Nazis during WWII, Sartre was captured and imprisoned by the Germans while serving in the French army. They let him go, but he joined the Resistance and continued to oppose the Nazi occupation until the war’s end. He clashed with, and finally endorsed, the Communist Party, and spent much of his later career trying to synthesize existentialist ideas with marxist ones. He was a polished and lucid writer, and he penned some solid fiction and drama in addition to his substantial philosophical tomes. He maintained an open relationship with Beauvoir, and scandalized certain philosophical circles with such unseemly behavior as writing in cafés (it was different time) and discussing things that concerned real people, like sex. Sartre’s famous assertion that "existence precedes essence"—i.e., that we have no eternal "nature" besides the one we create for ourselves—has become a sort of motto for existentialism as a whole, and is probably the most concise and easy to grasp expression of the philosophy to be found anywhere. Another key concept is self-deception, or "bad faith"—our capacity to believe one thing and do another, or to hold two contradictory beliefs at once. He resisted claims that existentialism was a passive or hopeless philosophy, and argued that by granting humans full agency and responsibility for their own lives it was really a profoundly action-centric and optimistic worldview. He even addressed that tricky issue about the autonomy of the self versus the other by explaining that the moral action is always the one which grants freedom to one without taking it away from someone else. He was not immune to mistakes and moral failings, but nor was he unwilling to reconsider his convictions when the evidence was against him. He seems to have tried sincerely to live his philosophy, and for that reason is one of its best and most convincing spokespeople.   Albert Camus (French, 1913 - 1960)  Kaufmann wraps it all up with a few pages from Camus’s "Myth of Sisyphus." Camus and Sartre were friends and rivals who trafficked in similar ideas, though Camus preferred to call his ideology "absurdism." To be honest I haven’t read enough Camus to adequately explain the difference, and after working my way through a century or so of existential thought I don’t have the energy to look into it right now. Suffice it to say that the image of Sisyphus finding satisfaction and meaning even in his eternal toil is a memorable, if ambivalent, one to end the book on.   ***   So there we have it. With all that behind us, have we come any closer to an understanding of what existentialism is or means? Is it just a catch-all term for a bunch of related but distinct strands of individualist thought, or is there a kind of unity—even if only a loose unity—to the concepts and terms we deem existential? I’ll let you decide for yourself, as we all must do.  And the book? Anthologies live or die on the strength of their selections, and for the most part the selections here are strong. There are some weird editorial choices—pieces that should have been pared down substantially, pieces that were pared down too much—and, while Kaufmann’s long introductory essay is excellent, he provides almost nothing by way of textual notes or commentary. (And let me tell you, textual notes and/or commentary would have been a big help while trudging through some of these convoluted motherfuckers.) Finally, while I know that diversity was scarcely even a concept for most mid-century white academics, it’s hard to take completely seriously any "comprehensive" overview this white and male and European. The exclusion of Beauvoir is particularly inexcusable, and the inclusion of some POC thinkers such as Frantz Fanon (for whose  Wretched of the Earth  Sartre wrote an introduction) or Ralph Ellison (whose 1952 novel  Invisible Man  was a successful and very explicitly existential work) would have been both appropriate and welcome.  But for the first time I'm actually at risk of hitting GR's character limit, so I'll conclude with a quote from Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism" that I think embodies the best of existential thought. Whatever you choose to call it, I believe he hits upon something undeniably resonant for any honest individual who seeks to live a fulfilling life:     Quietism is the attitude of people who say, "let others do what I cannot do." The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, "Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is."

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