Sources and References

Primary texts

• Camus, Albert. The Outsider (L’Étranger). Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage, 1989.
• Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1991.
• Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling / Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Penguin, 1954. [Contains “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” “Twilight of the Idols,” “The Antichrist,” and selections from other works.]
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1964.

Supplementary

• Natanson, Maurice. The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1970.
• Zaner, Richard M. The Problem of Embodiment: Some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964.
• Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian Books, 1956.
• Flynn, Thomas R. Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Online resources

• Crowell, Steven. “Existentialism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
• McDonald, William. “Søren Kierkegaard.” SEP, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
• Leiter, Brian. “Friedrich Nietzsche.” SEP, 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
• Webber, Jonathan. “Jean-Paul Sartre.” SEP, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/

Chapter 1: What Is Existentialism? Origins and Themes

1.1 The Central Question

This course is organized around a single, deeply unsettling question: How should we live in a universe which provides no guidelines — in a universe with no objective values? This question did not arise in a vacuum. It crystallized in the intellectual and spiritual disruptions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when traditional religious authority, metaphysical certainty, and social consensus began to fracture simultaneously. The thinkers grouped under the loose banner of existentialism (存在主义) did not merely ask the question abstractly — they lived it, dramatized it in novels and plays, and proposed radically different but equally earnest responses.

Existentialism is less a unified philosophical system than a family of overlapping concerns. What unites Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus — despite their dramatic disagreements — is their insistence that philosophy must begin with the concrete existing individual rather than with abstract concepts or systems. The Cartesian rationalist tradition had asked what we can know with certainty; the existentialists asked what it is to be a person who must choose, suffer, die, and find some reason to go on.

1.2 Historical Context: The Collapse of Certainty

The intellectual background of existentialism involves at least three seismic shifts — what we might call historical ruptures, each one undermining a previously stable source of meaning.

The decline of religious authority. The Enlightenment critique of tradition, the rise of biblical historical criticism, and later Darwin’s theory of evolution all contributed to what sociologist Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt). For the first time in Western European history, a large secular intellectual class could not take God’s existence or God’s providential ordering of the cosmos for granted. This rupture was not merely theological; it destabilized the entire moral architecture of Western culture. The commandment not to kill, the duty to the poor, the hope for justice — all of these had been grounded, ultimately, in a divine legislator. Remove the legislator and the commandments float free, no longer self-evidently binding. Kierkegaard responded to this crisis from within Christianity, attempting to find a form of faith purged of false comforts; Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God the decisive cultural event of modernity; Sartre and Camus drew their conclusions in an assumed atmosphere of atheism. But all of them were working within the aftermath of this rupture, even when they disagreed about its significance.

The failure of Hegelian systematizing. G. W. F. Hegel had constructed a magnificent philosophical system in which individual human beings were absorbed into the movement of Absolute Spirit through history. Reality itself was rational, and the rational was real; the individual found her true freedom not in private choice but in the rational institutions of the state, the family, and civil society. For Hegel, what seemed like personal anguish and contingency would, when viewed from the perspective of the whole, reveal itself as a necessary moment in Spirit’s self-realization. Kierkegaard reacted with fury: the existing individual — with her anxieties, her loves, her fear of death — cannot be dissolved into a logical category. “The system” is built for no one who actually has to live. Nietzsche, too, mocked the dream of system-building, diagnosing Hegel’s optimism as a form of the slave morality’s consoling fictions. The existentialists are united by resistance to any philosophy that sacrifices the individual to an abstraction — however magnificent or internally coherent that abstraction may be.

The experience of meaninglessness in modern life. The industrialization of Europe, the anonymity of mass society, and eventually the catastrophes of the World Wars produced what was diagnosed as an existential malaise — a sense that traditional roles and meanings had become hollow. The factory worker reduced to a function in a production process, the soldier ordered to die for national abstractions, the suburban bourgeois surrounded by comfort but afflicted by a peculiar emptiness: these figures populate the existentialist imagination. Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin feels nausea in the face of brute existence; Camus’s Meursault drifts through life without engagement; these are not merely fictional devices but philosophical symptoms. The third rupture is thus not intellectual but experiential: modernity itself seemed to have produced a new phenomenology of meaninglessness, a feeling that one was inhabiting one’s life from the outside rather than from within.

1.3 Precursors: De Beauvoir and Heidegger

Before turning to the canonical figures, it is important to acknowledge two thinkers who occupied a complex relationship to the existentialist tradition — neither simply followers nor simply precursors, but contributors who significantly shaped the terms of the conversation.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) is often mislabeled as a derivative figure, a mere companion to Sartre. This is a serious misreading. De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) represent independent and in some respects more sophisticated contributions to existentialist thought than those of her famous companion. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir addresses a problem that Sartre’s Being and Nothingness left unresolved: if freedom is absolute and individual, what grounds any ethical claim on others? Her answer involves the concept of ambiguity (模糊性) — the condition of being both free consciousness and situated facticity simultaneously. We are neither purely free (as Sartre’s radical freedom sometimes implies) nor purely determined (as the naturalist would have it); we are ambiguously both, and this ambiguity is the very condition of ethical life. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir extends Sartre’s analysis of the Other and the Look to show how the category of “woman” has historically been constructed as the Other — defined not by her own projects but by man’s need for a foil to his own subjectivity. Women have been denied the existentialist condition of radical freedom not because of their nature but because of social structures that treat them as in-themselves rather than for-themselves. De Beauvoir thus opens existentialism to political and feminist analysis in ways that Sartre himself was slow to develop.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) presents a different case. His major work, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), predates Sartre’s Being and Nothingness by sixteen years and provided much of the conceptual vocabulary that Sartre and others would deploy — and transform. Heidegger was not, strictly speaking, an existentialist; he resisted the label and spent much of his career criticizing what he saw as existentialism’s residual Cartesian subjectivism. His project was ontological rather than ethical: he wanted to ask not how we should live but what it means to be. His concept of Dasein (此在, literally “being-there”) — the kind of being that we ourselves are, the being for whom being is an issue — is not quite a subject or a consciousness but a way of being-in-the-world. Crucially, Dasein is always already thrown into a world it did not choose (Geworfenheit, thrownness, 被抛性), always already with others (Mitsein, being-with, 共在), and always projecting toward possibilities that are bounded by the ultimate impossibility of death. Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity (本真性) and inauthenticity (非本真性) — where inauthenticity is the condition of living absorbed in “das Man” (the They, the anonymous public) rather than owning one’s ownmost possibilities — directly influenced Sartre’s concept of bad faith, even as Sartre rejected Heidegger’s ontological framework. Heidegger’s analysis of being-toward-death (向死而生) — which will receive extended treatment in Chapter 7 — made mortality not a problem to be solved but the structural feature that gives Dasein its urgency and individuality.

1.4 Defining Features of Existentialist Thought

Beyond Sartre’s slogan, several recurring themes cross the work of the major existentialists:

• Radical freedom and responsibility. Because there is no given essence, we are radically free — and this freedom is terrifying, not liberating. We are “condemned to be free” (Sartre) and cannot evade responsibility for what we make of ourselves.
• Anxiety and authenticity (焦虑与本真性). Anxiety (Angst) is not a pathology but a fundamental mood that reveals our freedom. To live authentically is to acknowledge this freedom rather than flee it into comfortable social roles or self-deception.
• Finitude and death. Human existence is bounded by death. Confronting mortality honestly — rather than pretending it is something that happens to others — is central to authentic existence.
• The absurd. The gap between the human demand for meaning and the universe’s indifference — what Camus calls “the absurd” — is not solvable by philosophy or religion but must be lived and responded to.

1.5 The Literary Dimension of Existentialism

A distinctive and philosophically significant feature of existentialism is its sustained use of literary forms — novels, plays, parables, diaries — to convey philosophical content. This is not accidental, and it is not merely a rhetorical strategy. It reflects a deep conviction about the nature of the philosophical problems being addressed.

Sartre wrote both rigorous philosophical treatises (Being and Nothingness) and novels (Nausea, The Age of Reason) and plays (No Exit, Dirty Hands). Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus (philosophical essay) and The Outsider (novel) as explicitly complementary explorations of the absurd — the same territory mapped by different instruments. Kierkegaard wrote philosophical works in the voices of pseudonymous characters, each inhabiting a particular existential stage. De Beauvoir moved between philosophy (The Ethics of Ambiguity), fiction (She Came to Stay), and autobiography (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) as different modes of the same inquiry.

This dual strategy reflects a conviction: the existing individual can only be shown, not deduced. A philosophical argument can establish that we are free; only a novel can make us feel what that freedom costs. More precisely, the novel form creates an epistemological situation for the reader that is structurally similar to the existential situation being described. When we read Nausea, we are not merely told that consciousness is disturbed by the contingency of existence; we experience something like that disturbance ourselves as Roquentin’s world grows progressively less stable. When we read The Outsider, we are not merely informed that society imposes narrative coherence on experience that lacks it; we feel the pressure of that imposition in the jarring shift from Part One’s paratactic registrations to Part Two’s trial narrative.

The existentialists also drew extensively on the literary tradition as a philosophical resource. Dostoyevsky — whose Notes from Underground is perhaps the first existentialist text — appears in Kaufmann’s anthology as a genuine precursor. Kafka’s figures of bureaucratic entrapment and inexplicable guilt resonate throughout existentialist accounts of the human condition. The existentialists were not simply philosophers who also wrote novels; they were thinkers for whom the boundary between philosophy and literature had become, for essential reasons, difficult to maintain.

Chapter 2: Kierkegaard — Anxiety, Despair, and the Leap of Faith

2.1 The Anti-Systematic Thinker

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is often called the first existentialist, though he would have rejected the label. Writing in the shadow of Hegel’s monumental Phenomenology of Spirit, Kierkegaard devoted much of his energy to demolishing the pretension that any philosophical system could capture the truth of individual existence. His key methodological move was the use of pseudonyms: many of his works were published under invented personas — Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Judge William, Johannes de Silentio — each representing a particular perspective or “stage” of existence. Truth, for Kierkegaard, is not a proposition but a way of life. His most famous methodological claim — “subjectivity is truth” — does not mean that truth is merely personal opinion but that the kind of truth that matters most for human existence is not the kind that can be established from a neutral external standpoint. It must be appropriated, inhabited, lived.

2.2 The Three Stages of Existence

Kierkegaard describes human existence as passing through (or being arrested in) three stages or “spheres” of life (Existenz-Stadien). These are not strictly chronological stages of development — one does not simply graduate from one to the next — but represent fundamentally different orientations toward oneself, the world, and the question of how to live. Each stage has its own internal coherence and its own characteristic form of failure.

2.2.1 The Aesthetic Stage

The aesthetic individual lives for immediate experience — pleasure, sensation, novelty, and the avoidance of boredom. The pseudonymous “A” in Either/Or exemplifies this mode: he cultivates himself as an artistic connoisseur of experience, rotating through pleasures and perspectives to prevent habituation. Don Juan is the archetypal figure — not because Don Juan is merely a sensualist but because he represents the idea of musical eroticism, the inexhaustible drive for new conquest, the refusal to remain with any single object long enough for it to become familiar and therefore boring.

The aesthetic stage is not simple hedonism. It includes intellectual aestheticism — the person who collects experiences and perspectives without committing to any. The aesthetic individual may be enormously sophisticated, widely read, culturally refined. What she lacks is not intelligence but commitment. She holds herself at an ironic distance from everything, including herself, reserving the right to step outside any engagement and observe it from the outside. This is Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of Romanticism: its cult of irony is a sophisticated form of the aesthetic, and its inability to commit is its fundamental spiritual failure.

2.2.2 The Ethical Stage

The ethical individual has made a decisive choice — the choice to commit. Judge William in Either/Or represents this mode: he has chosen marriage, profession, and civic duty not because these are pleasant (though they may be) but because the act of choosing constitutes a self. To choose marriage — not once, in a moment of feeling, but continuously, as a daily renewal of commitment — is to become someone: a husband, a father, a member of a community. The ethical individual lives by universal moral principles — Kant’s moral law would be an appropriate model — and believes that the highest human task is to realize one’s universal humanity through duty.

Judge William’s famous letter to “A” in Either/Or is a passionate argument for the ethical life. His central claim is that the aesthetic individual has not really chosen at all; she has merely drifted from one state to another, following inclination. The ethical individual chooses herself — chooses to be the person she is — and in doing so becomes, for the first time, genuinely free. There is something deeply attractive about this argument. The ethical stage is a genuine advance over the aesthetic: it replaces the fragmented aesthetic life with integrity, commitment, and a relationship to others built on genuine obligation rather than the instrumentalization of pleasure.

But the ethical stage is ultimately insufficient. Kierkegaard’s diagnosis is precise: the ethical person is still measuring herself against universal standards — the standards of reason, society, morality. She has not yet confronted the absolute, singular, incommensurable relation between herself and God. More subtly, the ethical person can become proud of her virtue, confident in her fulfillment of duty, satisfied with herself in a way that forecloses rather than opens the deepest questions. The ethical life can become a more sophisticated form of the flight from anxiety that characterized the aesthetic.

2.2.3 The Religious Stage

The religious stage involves a movement beyond the universal to a direct, absolute relationship with God. Crucially, this relationship cannot be mediated by reason, social norms, or ethics. The universal ethical framework — which served Judge William so well — is precisely what must be suspended. It requires what Kierkegaard calls the leap of faith (信仰的飞跃): a movement that is not the conclusion of an argument but a decision, made in the full awareness of its groundlessness.

The teleological suspension is not a license for arbitrary violence. Kierkegaard is not saying that anyone who claims a divine mandate may do anything. He is making a structural philosophical point: there is a dimension of the individual’s relation to the Absolute that cannot be captured, justified, or even communicated in the language of universal ethics. This is why faith is terrifying, not comforting. And it is why, as Johannes de Silentio repeatedly insists, he cannot make the movement himself. He can describe and admire it; he cannot perform it.

2.3 Fear and Trembling: The Abraham Narrative

Fear and Trembling (1843) is Kierkegaard’s most searching meditation on the structure of faith. The book’s full title continues with A Dialectical Lyric, and its form is deliberately oblique: Johannes de Silentio claims not to be a man of faith himself but rather someone who stares at Abraham in fascinated incomprehension, someone for whom Abraham is simultaneously admirable and impossible to understand.

The text opens with four poetic variations on the Akedah — the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). Each variation imagines a different outcome or a different inner state for Abraham, exploring what faith would look like if it were contaminated by doubt, heroic resignation, or secret guilt. What if Abraham doubted, and tried to project his own despair onto Isaac so that Isaac would not think God monstrous? What if Abraham tried to convince himself that it was his own desire, not God’s command, that led him here? What if Abraham resigned himself to losing Isaac but lost his faith in the process? These variations are not merely literary exercises; they are philosophical probes designed to show that Abraham’s actual faith is irreducible to any of them. Faith is not resignation, not heroism, not self-deception, not tragic nobility. It is something that none of these approaches can reach.

2.3.1 The Knight of Infinite Resignation vs. the Knight of Faith

Johannes de Silentio distinguishes between two figures that are easily confused but fundamentally different. The knight of infinite resignation (无限弃绝的骑士) renounces the finite — his love, his earthly hope — and finds consolation in the eternal. He accepts the loss with nobility. His renunciation is complete and genuine. He is, in many ways, a heroic figure — and one whom most of us can understand, because his movement is the movement of stoic acceptance, the movement of anyone who has learned to live with loss. The knight of faith (信仰的骑士), by contrast, makes the same infinite movement of resignation but then, by virtue of the absurd, makes a second movement: he believes that in spite of everything, in spite of the impossibility and the irrationality of the hope, he will receive the finite back. Abraham does not simply resign himself to losing Isaac; he believes — without rational warrant, “on the strength of the absurd” — that Isaac will be restored.

2.3.2 The Absurdity of Faith

The word “absurd” (det absurde) is central to Kierkegaard’s account of faith, and it is important to distinguish his use from Camus’s. For Kierkegaard, the absurd is not a cosmic condition — not the silence of the universe in the face of human longing — but a specific logical structure: the movement of faith is “absurd” in the sense that it is beyond reason, not because reason gives a negative verdict but because reason simply has no category for it. Abraham’s faith is not irrational in the sense of contradicting logic; it is trans-rational in the sense that logic cannot reach the kind of certainty Abraham has.

This raises what Kierkegaard regards as the deepest and most troubling problem: how do you know that what you take to be a divine command is not a delusion? How do you distinguish the genuine knight of faith from the madman who merely thinks he has received a divine mandate? Kierkegaard does not resolve this problem — and he is honest enough to acknowledge it. The terror and trembling of the title are not just Abraham’s; they are the condition of anyone who genuinely understands what faith requires. Faith is not a comfortable certainty but a permanent risk.

2.3.3 The Structure of Anxiety

In The Concept of Anxiety (though not assigned, its concepts pervade the course), Kierkegaard defines anxiety (焦虑/Angst) as the “dizziness of freedom.” The image is precise: when you stand at the edge of a cliff, you experience not only the fear of falling but the vertiginous awareness that you could jump — that nothing external prevents you. Fear has an object: the fall. Anxiety has no object: it is the awareness of the open possibility of the self. It is the mood in which freedom reveals itself as freedom — as the terrifying lack of a fixed nature that would determine what you will do. Anxiety is thus not a problem to be treated but an existential disclosure: it reveals that you are free, that you have no given self, that what you will be depends on choices you have not yet made.

2.4 Despair as the Sickness unto Death

In The Sickness unto Death, the pseudonym Anti-Climacus defines despair (绝望) not as sadness but as a failure of selfhood. The self, for Kierkegaard, is a relation that relates to itself — a dynamic synthesis of freedom and necessity, finitude and infinitude, temporal and eternal dimensions. Despair arises when this synthesis fails in one of two directions: when a person refuses to be what she is (despair in the mode of possibility — the self loses itself in fantasy and abstraction) or collapses into what she is without acknowledging her freedom (despair in the mode of necessity — the self is suffocated by its own facticity).

The most fundamental form of despair, Anti-Climacus argues, is despair in not willing to be oneself before God. Even those who seem psychologically content — who are cheerful, socially successful, apparently at peace — may be in despair if they have not grounded their selfhood in the power that established it. This is why Kierkegaard calls despair “the sickness unto death” — not a physical illness but an existential condition that permeates modern secular life. Most people, he suggests, are in despair without knowing it; the comforts of modern society are precisely designed to make this unknowing comfortable.

Chapter 3: Nietzsche — The Death of God and the Will to Power

3.1 Nietzsche as Philosopher of the Crisis

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is the most electrifying and the most easily misread of the thinkers in this course. He wrote in aphorisms, in parables, in lyrical bursts of polemic — deliberately resisting the kind of systematic exposition that would make his ideas safe and digestible. He was not a systematic existentialist but a diagnostician: he aimed to reveal the hidden sicknesses of Western culture, particularly the moral and metaphysical illusions that had sustained it. His method was genealogical and psychological: instead of asking whether a belief is true, he asked what kind of life-conditions produced it, what needs it serves, whether it is an expression of strength or an expression of weakness and resentment.

3.2 “God Is Dead”

The most famous passage in Nietzsche is the parable of the madman in The Gay Science (§125), echoed throughout The Portable Nietzsche:

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

The madman’s cry — “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?” — captures the vertigo of a culture that has destroyed its own foundations without yet realizing what it has done. Nietzsche writes from within this crisis, not to lament it but to ask: what now?

3.3 Nihilism and Its Varieties

Nihilism (虚无主义) is the view that life has no meaning, value, or purpose. Nietzsche regarded it as the direct consequence of the death of God — and as the defining danger of the modern age. But he distinguished between forms of nihilism:

3.4 Will to Power

Will to power (权力意志) is Nietzsche’s most central and most misunderstood concept. It does not mean a drive for political domination or control over others. It is better understood as the fundamental drive of all living things — and especially of human beings — toward the expression and enhancement of power in the sense of capacity, excellence, overcoming resistance.

The concept appears throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the figure of Zarathustra himself: he is not powerful over others but powerful in his capacity for self-overcoming and creation. The chapter “On Self-Overcoming” makes the point explicitly: even the drive for knowledge, even the drive for love, are expressions of will to power. A scientist who works obsessively to understand the world, an artist who imposes form on raw material, a philosopher who refuses comfortable answers — all of these manifest will to power in its healthy, affirmative form.

3.5 Perspectivism and Its Epistemic Implications

Perspectivism (透视主义) is Nietzsche’s epistemology, and it is one of his most challenging and most productive contributions to philosophy. Its central claim is that there is no “view from nowhere” — no access to truth that is independent of a particular perspective, set of needs, and interpretive framework. Every claim to knowledge is made from somewhere, by someone, in service of some interest (even if that interest is sublimated and difficult to recognize).

This does not mean, however, that all perspectives are equally valid. Nietzsche is not a relativist in the simple sense. Some perspectives are richer, more life-enhancing, more honest, more productive of new insight than others. The perspective of the ressentiment-filled slave moralist is narrow, reactive, and ultimately self-defeating; the perspective of the noble affirmer, who sees clearly because she has no need to distort, is wider and more generous. The criterion is not truth as correspondence to an external fact but truth as a condition of life — does this perspective enhance, enlarge, invigorate existence? Or does it shrink it?

Perspectivism also bears on Nietzsche’s own project. He is aware that his own critiques of morality and metaphysics are themselves made from a perspective — his own, that of a particular kind of European philosopher at a particular historical moment. This awareness gives his writing its peculiar reflexive quality: he does not claim to stand outside the tradition he is criticizing but to stand at an angle to it, to see it as from the side, where its hidden assumptions become visible.

3.6 Ressentiment and Slave Morality

In On the Genealogy of Morality (selections in The Portable Nietzsche), Nietzsche offers a historical psychology of moral values. He distinguishes master morality from slave morality (主人道德 vs. 奴隶道德).

Master morality begins with the noble individual’s affirmation of herself as good. “Good” means excellent, powerful, life-affirming. “Bad” is the secondary term — it designates what is low, weak, contemptible. The master creates values out of the overflow of strength.

Slave morality begins with ressentiment (怨恨) — the suppressed hatred of the weak for the strong. Unable to overcome the strong through action, the slave takes a psychological revenge: she redefines “good” and “evil” by inverting master values. The strong are now “evil” (arrogant, selfish, cruel); the weak are now “good” (humble, meek, patient). Christian morality is Nietzsche’s primary target: the Beatitudes — “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” — are, on this reading, the most sophisticated expression of slave morality’s revenge.

3.7 The Dionysian and the Apollonian

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), one of his earliest works, Nietzsche introduced a distinction that haunts everything he later wrote: the opposition between the Apollonian (阿波罗精神) and the Dionysian (狄奥尼索斯精神). These are not simply aesthetic categories but fundamental attitudes toward existence.

The Apollonian — named for Apollo, the god of form, light, and individuation — represents the drive to create beautiful, bounded, intelligible forms. It is the drive that produces the epic, the statue, the ordered narrative; it respects measure, proportion, and the principium individuationis (the principle of individuation that distinguishes one being from another). Apollonian art soothes: it gives us the world as ordered, comprehensible, beautiful.

The Dionysian — named for Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy, and dissolution — represents the drive to dissolve individuation, to merge with the primordial flux of existence, to experience the terror and the exhilaration of a reality that has no fixed boundaries. Dionysian art (Greek tragedy, at its height) does not console; it discloses the monstrous excess, the suffering, the irrationality at the heart of existence. Yet this disclosure is not pessimistic: to see existence in its Dionysian depth and still to affirm it — to say yes to the suffering, the chaos, the transience — is the highest possible act of the human will.

Nietzsche’s thesis in The Birth of Tragedy is that Greek tragedy represented a unique achievement: it used Apollonian form (the structure of the play, the beauty of the chorus, the measured speeches of the hero) to express Dionysian wisdom (the dissolution of individual identity, the affirmation of life including its suffering). When Socrates and Euripides introduced rationalism into tragedy — when they made the hero argue his way through his fate rather than suffer it — the Dionysian element was destroyed, and tragedy became mere drama.

3.8 The Übermensch and Eternal Recurrence

The Übermensch (超人, “overman” or “superhuman”) is Zarathustra’s vision of what human beings might become. The Übermensch is not a biological superman but a new type of human being: one who, having fully internalized the death of God and the absence of objective values, creates new values out of the abundance of his will to power. He affirms life even in its suffering and impermanence. He does not need external authority — divine, social, or rational — to tell him what is good.

Eternal recurrence (永恒轮回) is Nietzsche’s strangest and most profound thought. In The Gay Science (§341) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra confronts the idea: what if you had to live your life again, in exactly the same sequence of events, infinitely many times? Not a better life, not a redemption, not an afterlife — but this life, exactly as it was, including every suffering, every humiliation, every moment of boredom or despair.

The thought is not a cosmological theory but an existential test (存在的考验). Can you affirm your life so completely — love it with amor fati (命运之爱, love of fate) — that you would will its eternal return? The test is maximally demanding precisely because it removes every consolation: there is no improvement to hope for, no higher meaning that redeems the suffering, no endpoint that gives retrospective coherence to the whole. You must love this life as it is, or admit that you cannot love it at all.

Only the Übermensch can pass the test of eternal recurrence. The person of ressentiment — who feels that life has wronged her, who has organized her values around the resentment of what she does not have — cannot will the eternal return, because to do so would be to will the return of her own resentment, her own suffering, her own smallness. Eternal recurrence thus functions as a selection principle: it selects for the kind of person who has achieved complete self-affirmation.

Chapter 4: Sartre — Freedom, Bad Faith, and Nausea

4.1 The Philosopher of Radical Freedom

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) is the philosopher most consistently identified with the word “existentialism” — in part because he was the first to embrace the label, in his 1945 lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” His major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), is one of the most formidable texts of twentieth-century philosophy; his novel Nausea (1938) enacts its central insights in literary form. Together they constitute the most sustained philosophical account of freedom, consciousness, and bad faith in the existentialist tradition.

4.2 Being-in-Itself and Being-for-Itself

Sartre’s ontology divides being into two irreducible modes.

The café waiter example, which Sartre uses to illustrate bad faith, is best understood against the background of this distinction. The waiter who plays at being a waiter is attempting to be a being-in-itself — to have the self-coincidence of a thing — while being inevitably a being-for-itself. This is the fundamental human temptation: to escape the anxiety of freedom by becoming, in one’s own self-understanding, a thing with a fixed nature.

The fundamental asymmetry between in-itself and for-itself generates the central existentialist problematic: the human being (being-for-itself) perpetually tries to be both — to have the solidity and self-coincidence of a thing while retaining the freedom and self-awareness of consciousness. Sartre calls this impossible project the desire to be God: to be a consciousness that is also its own foundation, a being that is causa sui. This project is necessarily self-defeating: you cannot be both free and fixed, both transparent to yourself and opaque, both consciousness and thing.

4.3 Existence Precedes Essence

Sartre’s slogan — existence precedes essence (存在先于本质) — condenses an entire ontology into a compact formula. For objects designed by human beings, essence precedes existence: the craftsman has a concept of the knife (its essence) before she makes it. Medieval theology applied the same logic to human beings: God had a concept of “human being” before creating us, as a craftsman does. If God does not exist, Sartre argues, there is no antecedent “human nature.” We simply exist — and we define what we are through our choices.

4.4 “Existentialism Is a Humanism”: The 1945 Lecture

In October 1945, Sartre delivered a public lecture in Paris titled “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme), which became the most widely read introduction to his philosophy. The lecture is in some ways a simplified and popularized version of Being and Nothingness, but it is philosophically significant because of the specific objections it addresses — objections that reveal what was at stake politically and culturally in Sartre’s position.

Sartre identifies and responds to two main lines of attack. The first comes from communist critics who argue that existentialism is too individualist: by making everything hinge on individual choice, it ignores the social conditions that structure — and often determine — what choices are available. How can a factory worker “freely choose” her condition when she has been systematically denied the education, resources, and social position that would make genuine choice possible? Sartre’s response is that existentialism does not ignore situation but insists that even within situation, consciousness retains its freedom — not the freedom to do anything, but the freedom to take up one’s situation in different ways, to choose one’s attitude toward it.

The second line of attack comes from religious critics who argue that without God, there is no objective basis for morality, and that existentialism therefore licenses immorality or nihilism. Sartre’s response is the famous argument from choice: when I choose for myself, I am necessarily choosing for all human beings, because my choice expresses a conception of what human existence ought to be. If I choose to be cowardly, I am implicitly asserting that cowardice is an acceptable human response; if I choose courage, I affirm courage as a universal value — not in the sense that I impose it on others, but in the sense that my choice has the structure of a claim about what is genuinely human. This response has been criticized as underdeveloped, but its intent is clear: Sartre wants to show that radical freedom does not collapse into relativism because choice always has the form of a universal claim.

The lecture also contains the famous illustration of the student who must choose between staying to care for his mother and joining the French Resistance. No general principle — not Kantian universalizability, not Christian charity, not utilitarian calculation — can resolve this dilemma. The student must choose, and in choosing, he creates himself. Sartre’s point is not that the choice is arbitrary but that its final ground is the person making it, not a pre-given rule.

4.5 Bad Faith

Bad faith (坏信念/自欺, mauvaise foi) is Sartre’s term for the characteristic human strategy of fleeing from freedom by pretending to be a thing — by identifying with a role, a nature, or an essence so completely that one denies the transcendence that constitutes consciousness.

Bad faith is not the same as lying, because the person in bad faith deceives herself. It is the peculiar structure of consciousness — which knows what it is hiding — that makes self-deception possible. Sartre distinguishes bad faith from sincerity: the sincere person honestly acknowledges her failings. But sincerity, paradoxically, can also be a form of bad faith if one crystallizes those acknowledged failings into a fixed nature. “I am a coward” — said with the intention of there being nothing further to do — is a form of bad faith. It converts the for-itself (which is always free to choose otherwise) into an in-itself (which simply is what it is). Even self-knowledge, if it becomes an alibi for inaction, is bad faith.

4.6 The Look and The Other

For Sartre, the Other (他者) is not merely another person but a fundamental threat to my freedom. When another person looks at me — the look (目光, le regard) — I suddenly experience myself as an object in their world. I am seen, classified, judged; my freedom is momentarily frozen into a facticity. The famous example from Being and Nothingness is the experience of shame: I am caught peering through a keyhole, and someone suddenly appears behind me. In that instant I feel myself becoming what the Other sees — a voyeur, an object of contempt.

Sartre’s analysis leads to his darkest social thesis, dramatized in the play No Exit: “Hell is other people” (l’enfer, c’est les autres). This does not mean others are unpleasant; it means that the Other’s look threatens my project of self-definition by constituting me as an object outside my own control. Every relationship is structured by a contest for subjectivity: I try to constitute the Other as an object, the Other tries to constitute me.

4.7 Nausea: Philosophical Content and Literary Analysis

Nausea (La Nausée, 1938) is Sartre’s earliest major work and arguably the most successful fusion of existentialist philosophy with novelistic form. Its protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, is a solitary historian living in the fictional French provincial town of Bouville, engaged in research on an obscure eighteenth-century nobleman. The novel takes the form of a journal in which Roquentin records a growing and inexplicable sense of malaise.

4.7.1 The Discovery of Contingency: The Chestnut Tree Scene

The philosophical climax of Nausea is the scene in the public garden. Roquentin sits before the gnarled root of a chestnut tree and suddenly sees it as it truly is:

“The root of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just below my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. Words had vanished, and with them the meaning of things, their modes of use, the faint points of reference which men have traced on their surface… I was sitting, slightly bent, my head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, which was entirely raw… existence had suddenly unveiled itself.”

This passage enacts what Sartre means by contingency (偶然性): things do not need to exist; they simply, gratuitously, do exist. Roquentin’s nausea is the visceral registration of this fact. The categories by which we normally organize the world — names, purposes, meanings — are human overlays on a brute, excessive, unnecessary mass of being. The word “root” normally mediates our encounter with the chestnut’s underground structure: it tells us what the thing is for, where it fits in a network of meanings. But in the moment of the vision, the word dissolves, and what remains is the raw, formless, superabundant fact of existence itself.

The key philosophical move is Roquentin’s recognition that this excess — this gratuitousness, this radical lack of necessity — is not a feature of the chestnut root alone but of everything, including himself. He too exists contingently. There is no reason why he exists; no reason why he is what he is rather than something else; no reason why anything is rather than nothing. The horror of this recognition is not metaphysical but visceral: Roquentin feels it in his body, as nausea. The body is the medium through which the deepest philosophical insight becomes unavoidable.

4.7.2 Roquentin and the Salauds: Bad Faith on a Social Scale

The bourgeois inhabitants of Bouville embody bad faith on a collective scale. The gallery of portraits of local worthies — the “Bastards” (salauds) as Roquentin privately calls them — represents people who have convinced themselves that they have a right to exist, that their existence is necessary, justified by social position, family, and tradition. They look out of their painted frames with an expression of righteous self-satisfaction: their lives were justified by their duties, their accomplishments, their place in the social order. They suffered in order to serve; they served in order to deserve; they deserved in order to exist.

The Self-Taught Man (l’Autodidacte) is Bouville’s most pathetic embodiment of this bad faith. He is working his way through the municipal library in alphabetical order, accumulating knowledge not because he has a genuine intellectual project but because he believes that culture — systematically ingested — will constitute a justification for his existence. He is the humanist Sartre most wants to expose: his love of “humanity” is an abstraction, a collection of books, a way of filling the void of contingency with borrowed significance. When Roquentin, in their celebrated lunch conversation, points out the emptiness of this project, the Self-Taught Man has nothing to fall back on. His humanism is bad faith.

The museum scene in Nausea — where Roquentin walks through the gallery of portraits of Bouville’s bourgeois founders — is the most direct philosophical set-piece in the novel. These painted men had convinced themselves and their community that they had a reason to exist, that their success was earned, that their position in the social order was a form of moral achievement. Roquentin’s eyes strip this away: what he sees is a collection of contingent beings who have dressed their contingency up in moral authority. The portraits do not convince him of their subjects’ dignity; they confirm his sense that all such claims to justification are simply bad faith elevated to a civic institution.

Chapter 5: Camus — The Absurd and The Outsider

5.1 Camus and the Absurd

Albert Camus (1913–1960) resisted the label “existentialist” — in part because he disagreed sharply with Sartre on political questions, and in part because his philosophical position is genuinely distinct. Where Sartre locates the fundamental problem of human existence in freedom and bad faith, Camus locates it in the absurd (荒诞) — and proposes a different set of responses.

Camus defines the absurd not as a property of the world alone, nor of human beings alone, but as the confrontation between the two:

5.2 The Outsider: Style as Philosophy

The Outsider (L’Étranger, 1942) is the most widely read novel in this course and one of the most carefully constructed philosophical novels of the twentieth century. Its style is not merely an aesthetic choice but a philosophical instrument: the flat, paratactic (并列句式的) prose, the refusal of causal connectives, the emotional detachment of the narrator enact, at the level of syntax, the character of Meursault’s consciousness — and, more broadly, the character of experience stripped of the interpretive overlays that normally make it legible.

Parataxis — the grammatical structure in which clauses are placed side by side without subordinating connectives — is the formal equivalent of Meursault’s philosophical position. Normal narrative prose establishes causal and temporal hierarchies: “Because X, Y happened; after Y, Z followed; therefore Z was significant.” Meursault’s prose refuses this hierarchy. Events are placed next to each other without being subordinated to a narrative logic. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” The two clauses sit beside each other like objects on a shelf, without the one being explained by or leading to the other. This is not carelessness or callousness; it is a precise formal enactment of Meursault’s relation to experience: he registers what happens without organizing it into a story.

The philosophical implication is significant. Most of what we call “meaning” in human life is a function of narrative organization — the ability to tell a coherent story about who we are and why our experiences matter. Meursault’s paratactic prose refuses this organization not because he is unintelligent but because he is radically honest about the structure of his actual experience. He does not feel that events are causally and morally connected in the ways that narrative convention requires. To impose such connections would be to lie.

5.3 Meursault’s Affectlessness as Philosophical Position

The novel is divided into two parts. In Part One, Meursault attends his mother’s funeral, begins an affair with Marie, befriends the pimp Raymond, and kills an Arab man on a sun-drenched beach. In Part Two, he is tried, convicted, and condemned to death. The asymmetry is philosophically deliberate: Part One is about Meursault’s experience of living; Part Two is about society’s attempt to impose a narrative on that experience.

The prose of Part One is famously affectless. Meursault does not interpret his own sensations; he registers them. The opening line — “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know” — is not callousness but accuracy: Meursault does not know the date because he does not experience time as a narrative sequence. He lives in an eternal present of sensation and physical immediacy. Heat, light, fatigue, the sound of waves: these are what he attends to.

5.4 The Murder on the Beach

The killing of the Arab is one of the most analyzed events in twentieth-century fiction. Meursault shoots the Arab not in passion, not in self-defense in any clear sense, but — as he testifies — because of the sun. The explanation is not merely eccentric; it is philosophically loaded. Meursault does not experience the event as an act of will in the ordinary sense. He does not deliberate; the gun fires, then fires again. The event has the quality of something that happens rather than something chosen — and yet Meursault does not deny that he pulled the trigger.

Camus uses the flatness of the description to force a question: what makes an act murder? Is it the physical event, the mental state, the social context, the narrative we retrospectively impose? The Arab remains nameless throughout the novel — a fact that has rightly been criticized as a symptom of the colonial erasure that Camus never fully escapes, and which later postcolonial readers (most notably Kamel Daoud in The Meursault Investigation) have powerfully challenged.

5.5 The Trial: A Theater of Meaning-Making

In Part Two, the trial imposes on Meursault precisely the kind of coherent narrative — the story of a cold-blooded killer who did not weep at his mother’s funeral — that Part One refused. The prosecutor does not try to understand Meursault; he constructs a character: soulless, calculating, a threat to the moral order. The jury convicts this construction, not the actual person.

The trial is, in structural terms, a theater of meaning-making: it is the social institution specifically designed to convert raw events into morally intelligible narratives, to assign guilt and innocence, to establish the “truth” of what happened in a form that society can act upon. For this purpose, the prosecutor does not need Meursault’s actual inner life — which is inaccessible and perhaps incoherent by the standards of social narrative. He needs a story that will satisfy the jury’s expectation of moral coherence: a story in which the crime reveals the criminal’s true character, and the criminal’s character reveals a threat that must be neutralized.

5.6 The Chaplain Confrontation: Revolt and Lucidity

Meursault’s transformation occurs in his prison cell, when the prison chaplain makes his final visit. The chaplain insists on speaking of God, of hope, of an afterlife — insists on the possibility that Meursault might turn to God in his final hours, that there is still time to find consolation and meaning. Meursault, who has so far been passive and detached, suddenly erupts in rage — the only moment of sustained passion in the novel.

The rage is philosophically precise. Meursault is not angry because the chaplain is unkind; the chaplain is genuinely, perhaps touchingly, concerned. He is angry because the chaplain represents exactly the kind of bad faith — the “philosophical suicide” that Camus discusses in The Myth of Sisyphus — that Meursault has refused throughout his life. The chaplain’s certainties — God, grace, eternal life — are not certainties at all; they are wishes dressed up as truths. Against these wished-for certainties, Meursault asserts the one certainty he does have: his death, his life, his experience. All the chaplain’s certainties “were not worth a single hair of a woman’s head.” The concrete, the physical, the finite — which the chaplain dismisses as trivial compared to the eternal — are, for Meursault, all there is.

After the rage passes, Meursault opens himself to the night sky, to the “gentle indifference of the world.” He recognizes his kinship with the universe — not a consoling kinship, not a romantic nature-mysticism, but the sober recognition that he and the universe share the same quality of indifference to human meaning-making. And in this recognition, he finds something like peace: he has lived honestly, without the comforting fictions, and he is therefore “ready to live it all again.” This readiness is the absurd hero’s revolt: not a victory over death but a refusal to be defeated by the recognition of death’s finality.

Chapter 6: Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus, Revolt, and Meaning

6.1 The Philosophical Essay and the Novel

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) was published in the same year as The Outsider and is best read as its philosophical companion. Where the novel dramatizes the absurd condition through a specific life and a specific death, the essay examines the absurd directly, asks what conclusions follow from it, and considers three responses: physical suicide, philosophical suicide, and revolt.

6.2 The Only Serious Philosophical Question

Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with the claim: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” This is deliberately provocative. He does not mean that every philosopher should be preoccupied with death; he means that if life has no meaning — if the absurd is genuinely the fundamental condition — then the first question philosophy must address is whether life is worth living at all. All other philosophical questions are secondary.

6.3 The Three Responses to the Absurd

Camus examines three responses to the recognition of the absurd.

6.3.1 Physical Suicide

Physical suicide acknowledges the absurd — “life is not worth living” — and acts on that acknowledgment. Camus rejects it on the grounds that it is an evasion, not a solution. Suicide does not resolve the confrontation between human longing and the universe’s silence; it terminates one of the parties to the confrontation. It is a capitulation to the absurd rather than a response to it.

6.3.2 Philosophical Suicide

Philosophical suicide (哲学上的自杀) is Camus’s more surprising and more polemical target. It refers to any intellectual move that resolves the absurd by appealing to something that transcends it — by leaping beyond the evidence of experience to a transcendent meaning, a divine purpose, or a metaphysical consolation. The existentialists Camus criticizes most pointedly here are Kierkegaard and, to some extent, Jaspers and Heidegger.

Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is, on Camus’s reading, a philosophical suicide: confronted with the absurd — the impossibility of rational certainty about God or meaning — Kierkegaard leaps to affirmation of the absurd as a vehicle for faith. But this, Camus argues, is to evade the absurd by transforming it. The honest response is to remain in the confrontation without leaping to resolution.

6.3.3 Revolt, Freedom, and Passion

Camus’s own response is the triad of revolt, freedom, and passion (反抗, 自由, 激情).

6.4 The Absurd Heroes: Don Juan, the Actor, the Conqueror

Before turning to Sisyphus, Camus considers three “absurd heroes” — figures who embody different forms of revolt, freedom, and passion in their lived practice.

Don Juan is the lover who multiplies conquests not because he is shallow or because he fails to understand the depth of love, but because he understands it too well: he knows that each love is complete in itself, that the demand for eternal fidelity is a form of philosophical suicide (the attempt to escape the transience of experience by making one love absolute). Don Juan is not a libertine out of moral cowardice; he is a man who has accepted the truth of transience and refused to pretend otherwise. He “lives for quantity, not for quality” — and in this multiplication he embodies revolt and passion in their most recognizable human form.

The actor embodies the absurd in the structure of the performance itself: she lives multiple lives, inhabits multiple characters, explores the full range of human possibility — and then, at the end of the evening, returns to a single life that is no more “real” than the roles she played. The actor’s art is a confrontation with the arbitrariness of identity: any one of the characters she plays could have been “her.” This is not nihilism but a form of radical freedom — the recognition that selfhood is a performance, not a given.

The conqueror — not the political tyrant but the figure who engages with the world at maximum intensity, who throws himself into action not for the sake of its results (which are always provisional) but for the sake of the engagement itself — embodies the passion component of Camus’s triad. The conqueror knows that his victories will not last; he acts anyway, because the action itself is the point.

What all three absurd heroes share is the refusal of consolation combined with the affirmation of life. None of them resolves the absurd; all of them live within it with a kind of dignity that Camus wants to call happiness.

6.5 Sisyphus as Metaphor

The closing section of the essay turns to the myth of Sisyphus. In Greek myth, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity; it always rolls back down. Camus uses this image as the paradigm of the human condition: we too are condemned to labor at tasks that have no permanent result, in a world that provides no ultimate justification.

What is Camus’s response to this? It is perhaps the most famous single sentence of existentialist literature: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Why does Camus say we must imagine Sisyphus happy? The word “must” (il faut) is important. It is not a descriptive claim about Sisyphus’s psychology; it is a normative claim about how the absurd must be faced if it is to be faced honestly. To imagine Sisyphus wretched — dragging himself up the hill in misery, crushed by the meaninglessness of his task — would be to allow the absurd to win, to let the universe’s indifference become a defeat. To imagine him happy is to insist that the terms of the confrontation are not set by the universe; they are set by the quality of consciousness with which the confrontation is met. This is the final form of revolt: the refusal to be defined by the condition one cannot escape.

6.5.1 Sisyphus and Meursault

The connection between Sisyphus and Meursault is precise. Meursault’s final scene — his opening to the “benign indifference of the universe,” his “readiness to live it all again” — is the novelistic incarnation of Sisyphean revolt. Both figures are absurd heroes not because they have solved the problem of meaning but because they have refused to pretend it is solved. Their lucidity is their dignity.

6.6 The Absurd and Ethics

A persistent critical question is whether Camus’s absurdism leaves any room for ethics. If there are no objective values, what prevents the absurd man from any action whatsoever? Camus’s answer, developed more fully in The Rebel (1951, not assigned), is that the logic of revolt itself contains a principle of human solidarity: if I revolt against the absurdity of my condition, I implicitly recognize that every human being shares that condition, and therefore revolt against its imposition on others. Revolt becomes the basis for a this-worldly, immanent ethic of human solidarity — one that does not require God, nature, or reason as its foundation.

Chapter 7: Existentialism and Lived Experience — Embodiment, Others, Death, and Politics

7.1 Beyond Subjectivity: The World and the Body

The dominant image of the existentialist subject — isolated, choosing, confronting a silent universe — can obscure the extent to which existentialist thinkers also grappled with the social and embodied character of human existence. This chapter draws on supplementary texts (Natanson, Zaner) and the phenomenological tradition to fill out the picture, and extends the discussion to the political and feminist dimensions of existentialism that the primary texts open but do not always adequately pursue.

7.2 Embodiment

Embodiment (具身性) is the condition of being a body rather than merely having a body. The phenomenological tradition — associated primarily with Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty — insists that consciousness is never pure Cartesian cogito but always already embedded in a body that moves through a world, perceives from a particular location, and is vulnerable to fatigue, desire, pain, and pleasure.

Richard Zaner’s The Problem of Embodiment explores the philosophically puzzling status of the body: it is both subject (I move it, perceive through it, am it) and object (it can be observed, manipulated, treated as a thing by others and by disease). This double character — the body as lived from within and observed from without — maps onto Sartre’s distinction between being-for-itself and being-in-itself, but with the important addition that the body is not simply an instrument of consciousness but its medium and condition.

7.3 Being-with-Others

Sartre’s account of the Other is, as we saw, essentially adversarial. But this is not the only model available within the existentialist tradition. Maurice Natanson’s The Journeying Self draws on both existentialism and phenomenology to develop a picture of the self as constituted through encounter with others — through what Husserl called intersubjectivity (主体间性) and what Heidegger called Mitsein (共在, “being-with”).

For Natanson, the self is not an isolated Cartesian subject who subsequently encounters others; it is from the beginning shaped by language, gesture, role, and tradition that are essentially social. The “journeying self” of the title is one that moves through social worlds, taking on and shedding roles, discovering itself through its encounters — a more dynamic and less adversarial picture than Sartre’s.

This has implications for how we read Meursault. From a Natansonian perspective, Meursault’s asociality — his failure to participate in shared social meanings, to grieve properly, to love in expected ways — is not heroic authenticity but a kind of arrested development: a self that has not journeyed far enough into the social world to either inhabit it or revolt against it from within.

7.4 Heidegger’s Being-Toward-Death

Heidegger’s analysis of being-toward-death (向死而生, Sein-zum-Tode) in Being and Time is the most sustained phenomenological account of mortality in the existentialist tradition, and it differs significantly from all the other accounts we have encountered.

For Heidegger, death is not simply an event that happens at the end of life, like the last stop on a train journey. Death is a structural feature of Dasein’s existence — it is always already “mine,” always already approaching, always already shaping the way Dasein relates to its possibilities. Death is the “ownmost” (eigenst) possibility of Dasein: it is the one possibility that cannot be delegated to anyone else, that cannot be shared, that cannot be escaped, and that is “non-relational” — in dying, each of us is radically alone.

This analysis generates Heidegger’s concept of authenticity. Inauthenticity (非本真性) is the condition of living absorbed in “das Man” (the They, the anonymous public world of social norms and idle talk), in which death is acknowledged only as a generality: “one dies,” but not I, not now, not imminently. The They-self knows death as a fact about human beings in general but systematically distances itself from the recognition that this death is mine, coming for me, perhaps sooner than I think. Heidegger calls this distancing falling (沉沦, Verfallenheit): the tendency of Dasein to lose itself in the public world, to measure itself by public standards, and to forget the radical individuality that its own death discloses.

Authenticity is achieved when Dasein properly appropriates its being-toward-death — when it hears the “call of conscience” (Gewissensruf) that summons it back from the They-self to its ownmost possibilities. This is not a matter of becoming morbid or obsessed with death; it is a matter of allowing the recognition of finitude to clarify what genuinely matters, what one genuinely is, what one genuinely wants to do with the time that is available. The awareness of death as my death — certain, indefinite as to timing, non-delegatable — focuses existence in a way that the comfortable indefiniteness of everyday life does not.

7.5 Beauvoir’s Feminist Existentialism

Simone de Beauvoir’s contribution to existentialism deserves more extended treatment than it often receives, because it represents not merely an application of Sartrean concepts to the situation of women but a genuine philosophical development of the tradition.

The central argument of The Second Sex begins from a distinction between immanence (内在性) and transcendence (超越性). Transcendence is the existentialist category for the mode of being characteristic of the for-itself: always projecting beyond what one is, always engaged in projects, always making oneself through choices. Immanence is the mode of being characteristic of the in-itself: repetitive, enclosed, without forward movement. De Beauvoir’s argument is that women have historically been confined to immanence — to the repetitive labor of maintaining life (cooking, cleaning, bearing children) — while transcendence has been reserved for men. Women have been defined by men as the Other, as nature, as body, as the complement that allows male subjectivity to define itself by contrast.

This is not merely a sociological observation; it has deep philosophical implications. If the existentialist framework is correct — if authentic existence requires the exercise of freedom, the acknowledgment of one’s for-itself character, the refusal of bad faith — then the social conditions that confine women to immanence are not merely unjust but ontologically distorting. They prevent women from living as the kind of beings they fundamentally are. The woman who accepts the social definition of femininity — who becomes “the eternal feminine,” the muse, the mother, the complement to male subjectivity — is in bad faith, but a bad faith that has been imposed on her by social conditions rather than chosen in the ordinary sense.

De Beauvoir’s famous opening line — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — is the feminist version of “existence precedes essence.” Femininity is not a natural kind but a social construction: a set of behaviors, attitudes, and self-understandings that women are trained into from birth. This does not mean that biology is irrelevant; it means that the meaning given to biological difference is cultural and therefore changeable. To become genuinely free, women must resist not just explicit oppression but the internalized self-definitions that are the deepest form of their subordination.

7.6 The Question of Political Engagement

One of the most persistent tensions in existentialist thought is between the emphasis on individual freedom and authenticity, on one hand, and the demand for political engagement on the other. If freedom is individual, if authenticity is a matter of personal self-creation, what grounds any political commitment? And conversely: if political structures systematically prevent individuals from exercising their freedom, is there not an obligation to transform those structures?

Sartre’s trajectory over his career represents one answer. In the decade after Being and Nothingness, he moved increasingly toward political engagement — toward Marxism, anti-colonialism, and political activism — without entirely abandoning his existentialist framework. In Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), he attempted to reconcile existentialist freedom with Marxist social analysis, arguing that individual choices always occur within a social context (pratico-inert structures) that shapes and constrains them. The political activist is not betraying her existentialism by recognizing social structures; she is extending it to the level of collective action.

Camus’s response was different. His break with Sartre in the early 1950s over The Rebel is one of the most famous intellectual quarrels of the twentieth century. Camus argued that any political program that justified present violence for the sake of a future revolutionary paradise was committing exactly the philosophical suicide he had diagnosed in Kierkegaard: leaping from the actual, present reality of suffering to a transcendent future meaning that redeemed it. His alternative was what he called “Mediterranean” thought — a politics of limits, of present solidarity, of resistance to injustice without the intoxication of ideology.

De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity offers a third model: a political ethics grounded in the recognition that my freedom is conditioned by the freedom of others. If I genuinely value my own freedom — if I understand that freedom requires a world in which freedom is possible — then I must work to create and maintain the conditions under which others can be free. This is not altruism but a direct implication of the existentialist framework: to be for-itself is to be with-others, and the project of authentic freedom is necessarily a political project.

7.7 Death and Finitude Across the Tradition

Every major existentialist thinker places death at the center of authentic existence, but their accounts differ significantly.

For Kierkegaard, death is the great equalizer and the supreme teacher: it strips away all social distinctions and forces the individual to face herself absolutely. In The Sickness unto Death, death (as despair) is already present in the living person who refuses to become a self. Physical death merely makes visible what was spiritually true.

Nietzsche’s response to death is not philosophical acceptance but the existential test of eternal recurrence: can you affirm your life so completely that you would will it to return? This transforms the question of death from “how do we face the end” to “how do we face the whole of life.” Amor fati is the answer: loving one’s fate — including its mortality — as the condition for anything worthy of the name of existence.

Sartre argues that death is not my possibility at all. It is always something that happens to me from outside; it cannot be projected toward or anticipated in a way that structures authentic existence. Death is the ultimate intrusion of the in-itself into the for-itself.

For Camus, the confrontation with death is the existential context that makes the absurd visible. Meursault in his cell, contemplating his imminent execution, achieves the clearest perception of the absurd precisely because the removal of the future forces him into a pure present. What Meursault discovers is not terror but clarity: stripped of hope, he sees the world as it is.

7.8 Synthesis: Responses to the Central Question

We return, at the end of the course, to the central question: How should we live in a universe which provides no guidelines?

What unites these responses is not agreement but the depth of their seriousness: each thinker has looked unflinchingly at the possibility of meaninglessness and refused to look away. The disagreements — between Kierkegaard’s leap and Camus’s refusal to leap, between Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Sartre’s radical equality of freedom, between Sartre’s adversarial account of the Other and De Beauvoir’s political account of shared freedom — are not failures of philosophy but signs of the depth of the question. There is no algorithm for living in a universe without guidelines. There are only the examples of those who have tried to think it through — honestly, rigorously, at cost — and the task of taking up that thinking in our own lives.