Existentialism & Nihilism
I’ll map Existentialism and Nihilism as a genealogy — roots, forks, and false family resemblances — rather than as one school with a single founder.
Existentialism and nihilism are not parent and child. They are two growths from the same ground: the failure of inherited meaning after God, Nature, Reason, and History stop functioning as unquestioned foundations. Nihilism names the collapse. Existentialism names a family of responses to living inside that collapse. Some responses fight nihilism. Some pass through it. Some are accused of being it.
A tree is the right image only if you allow grafts, parasites, and branches that refuse the name of the trunk.
Before either word exists as a modern slogan, a few older roots feed both.
Biblical and Augustinian root. Job, Ecclesiastes, Paul, Augustine: the creature who cannot found itself, who is restless until it rests in God, who knows wretchedness and greatness together. This is not “existentialism.” It is the anthropology Pascal will sharpen and Kierkegaard will intensify.
Sceptical-modern root. Montaigne’s self as unstable; Shakespeare’s hollow men and unaccommodated man; Descartes’ cogito, which later writers both use and gut. The thinking thing is secured; the living person is not.
Pascal (1670) is the taproot of the whole later tree. Diversion, boredom, the thinking reed, the God of Abraham versus the God of the philosophers, the already-embarked wager. Every later branch that talks about flight from the self, anguish, or the death of philosophical consolation is in his debt, whether it admits it or not.
Kantian-Idealist weather. Kant splits phenomenon from thing-in-itself and makes freedom a problem. Hegel then offers the System as the place where the wound is healed in the whole. The existential tree grows as a revolt against that healing. Kierkegaard’s individual, Schopenhauer’s will, Dostoevsky’s underground, Nietzsche’s hammer: all are anti-systematic in different keys.
Do not fuse them. They share a word and not a bloodline.
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) popularises the word in Russia through Bazarov: reject authority, romanticism, art-as-sacred, inherited piety; trust science, utility, negation. Pisarev and Chernyshevsky give it a programme. It is not despair that “nothing matters.” It is militant confidence that the old values are nothing and should be cleared.
Dostoevsky writes against this plant. Notes from Underground (1864) is a bomb thrown at Chernyshevsky’s crystal palace. Demons and The Brothers Karamazov argue that the Russian negation, once it kills God, does not become scientific hygiene. It becomes permission, then murder, then a new tyranny (“I started from absolute freedom and arrived at absolute despotism”).
This branch begets: revolutionary politics, the antinihilist novel, and—at a distance—Nietzsche’s interest in a will that would rather will nothingness than not will.
For Nietzsche, nihilism is not a Russian student fashion. It is the inner logic of the West once “God is dead” and the highest values devalue themselves. Christianity taught truthfulness; truthfulness unmasked God; the world looks valueless. That is the event.
He splits it:
- Incomplete nihilism — God is gone, but people keep the old moral furniture (altruism, equality, “progress”) as if nothing had happened.
- Passive nihilism — exhaustion, Buddhism-as-he-reads-it, Schopenhauerian denial, the wish to be done with willing.
- Active nihilism — destruction of remaining values as a discharge of strength. A stage, not a home.
- Completed / overcome nihilism — revaluation: new values from the enhancement of life, amor fati, eternal recurrence as the extreme yes.
Schopenhauer is, in this map, not an “existentialist.” He is the great passive-nihilist metaphysician Nietzsche first loves and then attacks. Will is real; the answer is denial. Nietzsche keeps the will and reverses the answer.
Heidegger later treats Nietzschean nihilism as the end-state of Western metaphysics: Being reduced to value and will-to-power. That is another graft: nihilism becomes a chapter in the history of Being, not only a crisis of morals.
Relation of the two nihilisms. Russian nihilism is a local politics of clearance. Nietzschean nihilism is a European diagnosis of value-collapse. Dostoevsky stands between them as the novelist who saw that clearance does not stay in the laboratory.
“Existentialism” is a mid-twentieth-century name applied backwards.
- Kierkegaard does not use it.
- Nietzsche does not use it.
- It is not in Being and Time or Being and Nothingness.
- Gabriel Marcel uses the label (around Sartre, mid-1940s). Sartre first refuses it, then seizes it in Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945).
- Heidegger rejects it (1947): his question is Being, not a humanism of the isolated subject.
- Camus rejects it: he wants the absurd, not a philosophy of existence as self-creation.
- Jaspers prefers Existenzphilosophie.
So the “trunk” is real as a family resemblance, false as a party card. The resemblance is this:
Existence is not a case of a prior essence. The individual is not dissolved into system, species, or crowd. Freedom, guilt, anxiety, death, and meaning are not side issues. They are the subject.
Who feeds that trunk from the nineteenth century?
Pascal
Once the name exists, the trunk splits.
EXISTENCE AS PROBLEM
Christian branch. The self is a relation that cannot close. Anxiety and despair are religious categories. Help, if it comes, comes as transcendence, grace, or faith—not as self-invention. Marcel: being versus having, availability, hope. Jaspers: Existenz and Transzendenz, encompassing, communication. This branch can claim Pascal and Kierkegaard without theft.
Atheist branch. The same structures—anxiety, freedom, death, the look of the other—without the establishing power. Sartre: existence precedes essence; condemned to be free; bad faith; useless passion. De Beauvoir: the same freedom in situation, especially sexed situation (The Second Sex is existential ethics, not a side project). This branch can claim Nietzsche and Ivan Karamazov—though Nietzsche would have despised the moral pathos, and Ivan does not survive his own thesis.
Camus is a side-shoot, not a Sartrean twig. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) starts from the same silence of the world and refuses both Kierkegaard’s leap and Husserl’s consolation of essences. The absurd is the divorce between hunger for meaning and a world that does not answer. Revolt, freedom, passion—without hope of resolution. The Rebel then refuses nihilism’s political fruit: murder licensed by the idea. Camus is what happens when Dostoevsky’s warning and Nietzsche’s honesty meet a Mediterranean ethic of measure. He is closer to Beckett’s wait than to Sartre’s project, and he said so by walking away from the label.
Existentialism in Germany and France does not grow from Kierkegaard alone. It is grafted onto Husserl.
Husserl (Ideas, 1913)
Without Husserl there is still Kierkegaardian existence and Nietzschean crisis. There is not Being and Time or Being and Nothingness as they actually are. Phenomenology supplies a method for describing lived structures (anxiety, the look, the ready-to-hand) instead of arguing about them from a system.
Heidegger is therefore both indispensable to the tree and a critic of the tree. He uses Kierkegaard’s anxiety and Nietzsche’s nihilism, then says the real question was never man. Later Heidegger: language, Being, releasement—no longer an existential analytic of Dasein as the main road.
These are not decorations. In this family, the novel and the play often think first.
Baudelaire ──► modern lyric of spleen
Absurdism (as theatre and as Camus’s term) is a cousin, not a synonym. It emphasises mismatch and repetition more than project and choice. Beckett is its furthest point: less manifesto than remainder.
Psychiatric branch. Jaspers’s psychopathology; Binswanger and later Daseinsanalyse. Illness read as a narrowing of existential possibility. A side limb, but it shows the tree leaving the seminar.
Theological branch. Barth, Bultmann, Tillich take Kierkegaard (and sometimes Heidegger) back into preaching and hermeneutics: decision, demythologising, being-unto-death as a way to read the kerygma. This is existentialism returning to the church Pascal never left.
Feminist and postcolonial offshoots. De Beauvoir is the first full reconstruction: woman as the Other, freedom in oppression. Fanon uses Sartrean look and recognition against colonial objectification. These are genuine branches—same grammar of existence, new situation.
Stated as begetting, not as polite “influence.”
| From | Begets | How |
|---|---|---|
| Pascal | Kierkegaard | Restlessness of the self; need for a God who is not a theorem; greatness/wretchedness becomes despair/faith |
| Pascal | Baudelaire | Diversion becomes spleen; the room becomes Paris |
| Pascal | Camus (later) | Already embarked; suicide as the serious question |
| Schopenhauer | Nietzsche | Will as world-kernel; Nietzsche inverts denial into affirmation |
| Schopenhauer | Wagner, early Nietzsche, later “decadence” debates | Art as holiday from will |
| Kierkegaard | Heidegger | Anxiety, death, the individual versus the they; stripped of the leap |
| Kierkegaard | Sartre | Anguish, authenticity/bad faith as secular despair |
| Kierkegaard | Marcel, Jaspers, theologians | Existence before God kept as existence before God |
| Baudelaire | French moderns, Benjamin, Sartre’s streets | The city as the site where meaning flickers |
| Dostoevsky | Nietzsche | Kinship in the underground; warning Nietzsche partly refuses |
| Dostoevsky | Sartre | “Everything is permitted” becomes the starting gun of Existentialism Is a Humanism |
| Dostoevsky | Camus | Ivan and the Inquisitor behind The Rebel |
| Nietzsche | Heidegger | Nihilism as history of metaphysics; will to power as last name of Being-as-value |
| Nietzsche | Sartre / French atheism | Death of God without Nietzsche’s rank and recurrence |
| Husserl | Heidegger, Sartre | Method of description; then two different thefts of the ego |
| Heidegger | Sartre | Existence before essence, nothingness, being-in-situation—rewritten as freedom |
| Heidegger | late theology, hermeneutics, deconstruction | Not “existentialism,” but the next forest |
| Sartre | de Beauvoir, postwar letters, political existentialism | Freedom as ethics and as slogan |
| Sartre + Occupation | Beckett | Same world, heroism removed; wait replaces project |
Nihilism’s place in that table. It is not a person who begets. It is the weather. Russian nihilism begets Dostoevsky’s counter-stroke. Schopenhauer’s denial is classified by Nietzsche as passive nihilism. Nietzsche’s diagnosis begets Heidegger’s history of Being and Sartre’s “now we must invent.” Beckett is what a culture sounds like when the diagnosis has been accepted and the inventions have tired.
Hegel is the great negative condition: the System the others refuse. He begets by opposition.
Husserl is not an existentialist. He begets a method that existential ontology hijacks.
Marx crosses the tree after the war (Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason) but is a different root system: production, class, history. When existentialism grafts onto Marxism it changes species.
Freud is a rival anatomy of the same unrest. Sartre fights him in Being and Nothingness (bad faith versus the unconscious). Later existential psychotherapy negotiates.
Pascal names the self that cannot rest. Schopenhauer names the hunger that self is. Kierkegaard demands that it stand before God or admit despair. Baudelaire dresses the despair in modern clothes. Russian nihilists try to clear the ground with science and negation. Dostoevsky answers that the cleared ground is a crime scene. Nietzsche says the clearing is the event of the West and must be crossed, not mourned. Husserl asks how anything appears at all. Heidegger answers: as the world of a finite being toward death, in an age of nihilism. Sartre answers: as a nothingness condemned to invent essence. Camus answers: as revolt without leap. Beckett answers: as waiting and a voice that cannot stop. Christian existentialists keep the first half of Pascal’s wager. Atheist existentialists keep the room and refuse the fire. Nihilism is the name for the empty room. Existentialism is the quarrel about how to stay there without lying.
That is the tree. It has one soil, two plants called nihilism, a trunk that was named late, a Christian limb and an atheist limb, a phenomenological graft, a literary canopy, and a last thin branch where even the quarrel has grown quiet and only the going-on remains.
No comments:
Post a Comment