Blackwell Reference Online

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In the narrower and more popular of its several senses, “existentialism” designates the worldview and depiction of the human condition advanced by S artre and others (notably Camus (1913–60)) in the shadow of World War II. More broadly and significantly conceived, it refers to the radicalized “subjective turn” initiated by the mid-nineteenth-century reaction of Kierkegaard (1813–55) against H egel's idealism , and developed during the second quarter of the twentieth century in opposition to objectivity-oriented (naturalistic and positivistic as well as idealistic and rationalistic) treatments of human reality ( see logical positivism ; naturalism ). This movement attained prominence first in Germany, in the late 1920s, and then in France a generation later, as various German and French philosophers directed their attention to the purportedly fundamental “subjectivity” of “what it means to exist as a human being” (as Kierkegaard had framed the issue). The twentieth-century figures most closely and influentially associated with it prior to Sartre and Camus were H eidegger and Jaspers, whose Being and Time (1927) and three-volume Philosophy (1932) (respectively) launched it anew, and remain its most important texts. Both Heidegger and Jaspers repudiated the term “existentialism”, owing to its association with the views of Sartre from whom they wished to dissociate themselves. ... log in or subscribe to read full text