# Existentialism — A Brief Introduction

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Category: Philosophy
Slides: 13
Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:50.206Z
Tags: catalog, philosophy, existentialism

## Summary

Not “what is the world?” Key sections include: EXISTEN T IALIS M; Søren Kierkegaard; Friedrich Nietzsche; Martin Heidegger; Jean-Paul Sartre; Simone de Beauvoir; Albert Camus; The contributions.; The critiques.; The legacy..

## Slide Outline

1. EXISTEN T IALIS M
2. Søren Kierkegaard
3. Friedrich Nietzsche
4. Martin Heidegger
5. Jean-Paul Sartre
6. Simone de Beauvoir
7. Albert Camus
8. The contributions.
9. The critiques.
10. The legacy.
11. Further reading.

## Slide Transcript

### Slide 1: EXISTENTIALISM

- Corrigendum — vol. I
- a brief introduction · pamphlet nº 7
- • • •
- freedom — anxiety — the abyss
- 1844 – 1980

### Slide 2: I. The Question

- Not “what is the world?”
- but “what shall I do with my life?”
- Existentialism turns philosophy inward. The question is no longer the architecture of the cosmos, nor the categories of pure reason — but the small, urgent, first-person predicament of being someone, in a world that does not, by itself, tell us what to be.

### Slide 3: II. The Father

- 1813 — 1855
- Søren
- Kierkegaard
- “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
- The leap of faith. Reason runs out before God; what remains is a wager taken by the whole self.
- Subjective truth. The truth that matters is the truth one lives — passionately, in fear and trembling.
- Anxiety (Angst). The vertigo we feel before our own infinite possibility.
- Stages on life’s way: aesthetic → ethical → religious.

### Slide 4: III. The Hammer

- 1844 — 1900
- Friedrich
- Nietzsche
- “God is dead. And we have killed him.”
- The death of God. Not a triumph — a calamity. The old values lose their ground.
- Will to power. Life is the drive to grow, to overcome, to create.
- Eternal recurrence. Could you bear to live this life, in every detail, infinitely many times?
- The Übermensch. One who invents new values after the old gods fall.

### Slide 5: IV. The Forester

- 1889 — 1976
- Martin
- Heidegger
- “We are the beings for whom Being is a question.”
- Being-toward-death. Mortality is not an event at the end — it is the horizon that makes a life mine.
- Thrownness (Geworfenheit). We arrive in a world we did not choose, already underway.
- The question of Being. Western philosophy forgot it; Heidegger reopens it.
- Authenticity. Owning the life one has been thrown into.

### Slide 6: V. The Café

- 1905 — 1980
- Jean-Paul
- Sartre
- “We are condemned to be free.”
- Existence precedes essence. First we are; only then do we make ourselves something.
- Bad faith (mauvaise foi). Pretending we are not free, hiding behind roles and the gaze of others.
- Radical freedom. No alibi — not God, not nature, not nation — can excuse us from choosing.
- The Look. The other’s gaze fixes me, makes me an object.

### Slide 7: VI. The Companion, the Equal

- 1908 — 1986
- Simone de
- Beauvoir
- “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
- The Second Sex (1949). Founding text of modern feminism — and an existential treatise on becoming.
- Situated freedom. Freedom is real, but always situated in a body, a culture, a history.
- Woman as Other. Defined relative to man, denied the role of subject.
- The ethics of ambiguity. To be human is to be both freedom and facticity at once.

### Slide 8: VII. The Absurd

- 1913 — 1960
- Albert
- Camus
- “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
- The absurd. The collision of human longing for meaning with the silence of the world.
- Sisyphus. The stone always rolls back. The task is endless. And yet.
- Revolt, not despair. To live the absurd is to refuse both suicide and false hope.
- Lucidity. See clearly — and live anyway.

### Slide 9: Slide 9

- “
- Man is nothing else
- but what he
- makes of himself.
- — Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946

### Slide 10: VIII. What it gave us

- The contributions.
- A phenomenology of mood. Anxiety, boredom, nausea, dread — not weaknesses, but disclosures of how things are.
- Authenticity. A new ethical ideal: to live as the one whose life this actually is.
- The self as a project. Not a fixed essence, but a long, recursive act of self-making.
- The dignity of the first person. Philosophy spoken in the voice of someone, somewhere, choosing.
- • • •

### Slide 11: IX. Where it fails

- The critiques.
- Too individualistic. The lone subject choosing in a void — a fiction. We are always already entangled.
- Blind to structures. Marxists object: class, capital and history shape what we can choose. (Beauvoir partly answers this.)
- Vague on action. Authenticity tells me to choose — not what to choose.
- Bourgeois melancholy? A philosophy with the leisure to feel its own anxiety.

### Slide 12: X. After the war, after the cafe

- The legacy.
- Existential therapy. Yalom, May, Frankl — meaning, mortality, freedom and isolation as core clinical concerns.
- Agency in psychology. Self-determination, narrative identity, the self as project.
- Modernist literature. Beckett, Kafka (read backwards), Murdoch, Bellow, Ellison — the absurd as a literary key.
- Everyday vocabulary. “Authentic,” “bad faith,” “the absurd” — all out walking around now.
- • • •

### Slide 13: Coda

- Further reading.
- Kierkegaard — Fear and Trembling (1843)
- Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5)
- Heidegger — Being and Time (1927)
- Sartre — Being and Nothingness (1943); Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)
- Beauvoir — The Second Sex (1949); The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
- Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus (1942); The Stranger (1942)
- On screen.
- Sartre — existentialism lectures
- Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus
- — FIN —


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