The Nineteenth Century · School
Existentialism
From Kierkegaard to Sartre, concerned with individual freedom, choice and anxiety; existence precedes essence.
Representative figures · 9
Søren Kierkegaard克尔凯郭尔
Father of existentialism: truth is subjectivity, faith is a leap over the absurd, and life has aesthetic, ethical and religious stages, each entered by an irreversible choice.
Friedrich Nietzsche尼采
God is dead and all values must be revalued: will to power, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, philosophy with a hammer, and at the end a collapse in a Turin street with his arms around a horse.
Karl Jaspers雅斯贝尔斯
From psychiatry to the philosophy of existence: in limit situations one meets oneself and the Transcendent, reason and communication are philosophy's faith; he coined the 'Axial Age' and after the war asked about German guilt.
Martin Heidegger海德格尔
He raised anew the question of the meaning of Being: the human being is Dasein, thrown into the world, caring, being-toward-death; later he turned to language, technology and the history of Being. His entanglement with Nazism remains contested.
Jean-Paul Sartre萨特
Existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, hell is other people: he made existentialism a generation's way of life, refused the Nobel Prize, and moved from the café to the street.
Emmanuel Levinas列维纳斯
Ethics is first philosophy: the face of the other person commands me before all knowledge, 'thou shalt not kill', and I bear an infinite, asymmetrical responsibility for the Other.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty梅洛-庞蒂
The phenomenology of the body: we do not have bodies, we are our bodies; perception precedes every judgement as our original hold on the world. He was the most patient and least dogmatic of the phenomenologists.
Simone de Beauvoir波伏娃
'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman': The Second Sex applied existentialism to sex and launched second-wave feminism; she herself was the century's most famous intellectual woman.
Albert Camus加缪
The absurd and revolt: the world is silent and we crave meaning, and that is the absurd; the answer is neither suicide nor faith but revolt, freedom and passion. 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.'