Where would you classify existentialism in the history of philosophy? Here I go with the classificat

Would you consider the emergence of existentialism in the 19th century(Kieerkegaard and Nietzsche) as some sort of radical break with traditional philosophy, some new approach to philosophy that had no precedent?

Or was it merely reeactivating certain traditions in philosophy that had been so long dormant that it merely seemed to be something completely new? Example: would you classify Nietzsche as a completely original philosopher or as someone who was reinvigorating anti-Platonist elements that had long been forgotten?

I am not too up on my history of philosophy, but I think that it was a reaction against the rationalism of the scientific revolution that had occurred earlier in that century. (In fact, I think that existentialists were quite disillusioned by the advances in the biological science that seemed to reduce man to animal and providence for contingency.)

Was Nietzsche an original philosopher? In no way! You should read Max Stirner and his Ego and His Own, a work of anarchist thought that expressed many of the same ideas as N would express about 50 years earlier. There is no evidence that N read Stirner, but I would find it hard to believe he did not, as Stirner advocated an egoistic philosophy very similar to N's.

I also think that the pragmatists, ironically, had many of the same ideas as the existentialists, but came to very different conclusions on them. Both were skeptical of any logical justification for what is and is not "truth." Both saw the universe as essentially purposeless in an ultimate sense (read William James for this in particular). They both, for the most part, believed ethics to be reducible to subjective values. But the pragmatists were infected by a Humean view of empiriticm and were not willing to part with the scientific revolution in a way that the existentialists were.

Again, I am not historian of philosophy, but this has always been my read.

I think that a good case can be made that existenisalism did not emerge in the 19th C at all with either N or K. Rather it was a early to mid 20th C phenonmenon that emerged in France. At heart it was the baby of John Paul Sartre, without Sartre there would be no such thing as existensialism. Certainly it was only with Sartre that a cannon of existenisalism was constructed which certainly did include N and K. But this is only retrospectively, N and K never used the term or identified themselves with it. I dont think Sartre used the term very much either but the term was coined in reference to him and he didnt repudiate it (in fact he accepted it writing a short lecture Existentialism is a Humanism). It also should be noted that it was not simply a philosophical trend, something confined to the universities and to abstruse thinkers, rather it was to a large degree a youth movement kinda of like what happended in the sixities. With the end of the 2nd world war the youth of France was looking for something, anything, to give their lives meaning, something to define themselves by and something to rebel with. Existentialism provided this, and it generated a whole style of life and look to go along with it much in the same way as the hippies and the punks later on the track. THis is were we get the classic image of existensialism from, young people bored apathetic, wearing black and smoking ciggerates in coffee shops. Now many of these people may never have read any Sartre or Camus, and couldnt hold a philosopical conversation if there life depended on it, but they were part of the existensialism movemennt. Thus, in short, to describe existensialism properly we can not confine ourselves to the province of intellectual history or the history of philosophy, but must also include an understanding of the social history of the early to mid 20th C

Mr. Wormwood,

What you say is true: none of the existentialists really seemed to use the term much. Sartre did a bit, Camus used it only to distance himself from it. Nietzsche nor Kierkegaard used it (or showed any evidence of ever hearing of it.)

But this is the same with most "movements" in philosophy; the categorization doesn't generally come from within but from without. Of course, pragmatilsm was, as a word, first used exactly once by Peirce (who got it from Kant), and used as the title of a book and a "label" by James. Other pragmatists, like Dewey and Mead, never really took to the term, and always used it to distance themselves from it.

Think about "the empiricists" also here.

>>>It also should be noted that it was not simply a philosophical trend, something confined to the universities and to abstruse thinkers, rather it was to a large degree a youth movement

That is a quite interesting aspect of existentialism. At a time when philosophy was becoming a very professinal discipline confined to colleges and universities, existentialism was unique because its main faces (Sartre, Camus, De Bovoier, Nietzsche) were not academic philosophers, but writers. To this, we can't really compare it with many other philosophic movements with the possible exception of Rand's objectivism (if you want to call that a philosophic movement.)

Hi KevinCK,
thanks for your imput. I think you'll find that i did make the point that existentialism was defined from the 'outside'. However the essential crux of the matter and of my post is that this definition was made first and foremost in regards to the work of Sartre and to the influence of Sartres circle (which included de Beauvoir and Camus). Thus to say that Nietzsche is part of the existentialism camp makes no sense. The word wasnt coined at the time of N, he never used it, wouldnt of recognized it if it was used, and never identified with it. Existentialism was a 20th C phenonmenon, thats my point, it was not a 19th C phenonmenon. The thing is though that when existentialism did become a recognizable movment a lot of the youth in France were increasingly reading N, and so he became incorporated into an existentialist cannon. This is a subtle but important distinction, N was not an existentialist, but N's writings did exert an influence within the existentialist movement during the 20th C.

I'm not sure where Shakespeare drew it from, but Hamlet's famous soliloquy is certainly espousing an existentialist philosophical dilemma, albiet long before 'existentialism' proper.

Aside from the obvious framing of Hamlet's dilemma as "To be or not to be?", Hamlet is afraid of the unknown in death and afraid of suffering in life, and finally because of his fearful wavering existentialist 'nausea', Hamlet argues that man:

"Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action."

Ie we are rendered weak and indecisive by recognition of that dilemma, even despite our freedom to choose.

Still, I guess you wanted to know about the location of existentialism in philosophy 'proper'. I'd guess it has it's roots in scepticism and later in the discourse that erupted after Luther; but according to Heidegger the problem of existence is a necessary condition of Human 'being or Dasein, so it's always been there but hasn't always been recognised in self-reflection. On the other hand if you want to know who was the first to espouse a philosophy and call it 'existentialism', then it's a relatively uninteresting question.

As far as Sartre's existentialism goes, the actual philosophical reasoning is just as much inspired by Heidegger as it is by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, none of whom strictly assert an existentialist position of the kind Sartre and Camus proposed. Indeed, Schopenhauer was obviously aware of the general problem, hence his own analysis of Hamlet's soliloquy, which is biased towards his own position in order to avoid the dilemma.