What’s In a Name? “Existentialist” and “Existential” Philosophy

can we rightly call classic “existentialist” authors by that name?

(this was previously published in Practical Rationality)

An interesting question — or challenge — was put to me some time back by one of the viewers of my videos on Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. I’d used the phrase “Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy,” opposing that sort or style of philosophy to a Socratic or Hegelian idealist, universalizing type of approach. The issue that got raised — seemingly focused on the propriety of my speaking in such terms — bears on the history, rather than the meaning of “existential” and “existentialist”

Here’s the worry my interlocutor expressed. One of his well-meaning and fairly well-informed friends had pointed out that Kierkegaard wouldn’t have identified his own philosophy as “existentialist,” since that term was coined only much later, by Gabriel Marcel (writing about it in French).

So, it’s not a matter of whether Kierkegaard rightly belongs among the “existentialist” philosophers. In retrospect, of course he does, not least since so many self-identified “existentialist” thinkers explicitly hearken back to his thought, adducing him as a source. The question is more of a lexical one. Did Kierkegaard ever actually call his own approach, his thought, “existential” or “existentialist” philosophy?

If we are to remain at the level of the language itself, charting out the history of the term, then that “-ist” is not a mere suffix. Deciding when it became attached is not simply a quibble. In fact, there’s a larger issue at stake — one that came up several times in discussion during the lecture and discussion sessions of my Glimpses Into Existence series. Is it appropriate to speak of thinkers as “existentialist” who did not actually call themselves, or their writing, by that term?

This question of appropriateness yields in its turn to a yet deeper and more central question. Can we specify precisely what “existentialism” consists in, so that it encompasses all of the figures traditionally associated with that name, the spectrum from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, from Jaspers to Sartre? Is there an internal unity, a coherence to Existentialism that permits it to be applied retrospectively to thinkers, like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, or Rilke, who had no inkling they might be assembled together under that banner?

To swim our way back up out of these murky depths back to the surface, lexicological level, it is worth noting that we are confronted with a problem stemming from the fact that Existentialist literature straddles a number of different languages, namely Danish, Russian, German, then French and eventually English. While we might well look for some equivalent to the “-ism”, as in our English “existentialism”, we are only likely to find that in French, where Marcel does indeed coin the term “existentialisme,” cognate with “existentialiste”. These Gallic, extra-e, versions . . . they certainly map well onto our English terms.

So, should we say then that something that calls itself “existentialism begins in French philosophy, with Marcel’s use of the term in the 1930s? That certainly seems off though, doesn’t it? After all, Martin Heidegger speaks of engaging in analysis of “existentiality of existence” [Existenzialität der Existenz] in Being and Time.

A bit later, and uninfluenced by what is going on in French thought, Karl Jaspers is bringing out works like Vernunft und Existenz and Existenzphilosophie, hearkening back primarily to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as sources.

Lev Shestov, writing in Russian (and quickly enough translated into French) is explicitly speaking of Kierkegaard as bringing forth an “existential philosophy” in his Киргегард и экзистенциальная философия, which is then translated into French in 1936 as Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle. Vox clamantis in deserto, and then much later into English asKierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy.

So, it’s really back to Kierkegaard that we have to go, with his discussions of the “existential” point of view, and his stress upon concrete existence. Do we have any good reasons, based in terminology, to call Kierkegaard one of the “fathers of existentialism”?

I think in his case, we can answer this positively, by looking most specifically at the the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where he considers the question posed by existential philosophy, i.e. whether an “existential system,” analogous to the Hegelian system, could be possible?

It gets a bit trickier, of course, when we are dealing with other early figures in whose works we might find an occasional reference to “existence,” but whose reasons to be ranked among “existentialists” depends entirely upon two other criteria. One being that they acknowledgedly influenced later self-conscious “existentialists” who then corralled them retrospectively into a movement or at least current of thought. The other being that their thought clearly grappled with, even embraced and elaborated, some of the themes, issues, and problems the later “existentialist” movement took as their hallmarks.

Who would these early or intermediate figures include? Quite a few writers. Following Kierkegaard, we do have some Danes who are influenced by him. These include playwrights like August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen, and the Danish literary critic, Georg Brandes, of course. Then, we do have to take Dostoyevsky into consideration. But we might also think about several other Russian authors from the late 19th and early 20th century. I have in mind not Leo Tolstoy so much (people always want to bring up “The Death of Ivan Illych”) but instead Anton Chekhov.

Who else? The Czech (at that time, “Bohemian”) city of Prague supplies us with Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, both of them writing in German, the former exclusively, the latter mainly (supplemented by French), neither of whom identify with philosophical perspectives of their times, let alone an “existential” one. There’s also Spanish writers to think about. Miguel de Unamuno and Jose Ortega y Gasset are both clearly existentialist figures, writing before the term attains its critical mass of usage.

In my own view, the fact that those who self-consciously called themselves “existentialists” saw these earlier writers as precursors is reason enough for us to call them by that name in the present. If we need more, the fact that attentive reading of their texts reveals them dealing with classic themes and adopting approaches associated with later self-declared “existentialists” suffices, I think.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.