Existentialism & the Absurd Part 6: Key Thinkers

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Nietzsche himself would have rejected the existentialist label — it did not yet exist when he wrote — but no thinker was more influential on it. Born in a Lutheran parsonage in Saxony, trained as a classical philologist, he became at 24 the youngest professor at the University of Basel, then resigned a decade later for reasons of health and began the wandering, productive life that produced Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and Twilight of the Idols (1889). In January 1889 he collapsed in a Turin street, reportedly weeping over an abused horse, and spent the last eleven years of his life in mental darkness.

"God is Dead"

The most quoted Nietzschean line is also the most misread. From The Gay Science (1882), §125, the parable of the madman:

Nietzsche is not cheering. He is delivering a diagnosis. The educated 19th-century West has, through science, criticism, and historical scholarship, dismantled the practical authority of the Christian God. Most of the people who have done so have not yet realized what they have done. They still keep Christian morality, Christian guilt, Christian assumptions about meaning — without the divine ground that supported them. This is unsustainable. The "death of God" inaugurates a long period of cultural nihilism in which inherited values lose their grip and we have not yet replaced them.

Nietzsche's project — and what makes him existential — is to think through what comes after. If we are not given values, can we create them? If "Thou shalt" no longer comes from above, who legislates?

Will to Power & Eternal Recurrence

Two of Nietzsche's hardest concepts:

Will to power (Wille zur Macht) is not a desire to dominate others. It is Nietzsche's attempt to name the basic drive of all living things — the impulse to grow, to overcome, to express more strength, to become more of what one is. A plant pushes through the cracked pavement; an artist works late on a canvas no one will see; a researcher refuses an easy career to chase a hard problem. All these are will to power. Healthy will to power discharges itself in self-overcoming; sick will to power, denied honest expression, turns inward and becomes resentment, guilt, or domination of others.

Eternal recurrence (ewige Wiederkunft) is the thought experiment that for Nietzsche is the supreme test of a life. Imagine, he says in The Gay Science §341, that a demon comes to you and says: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more." Every joy, every pain, every spider in the moonlight, every conversation, every regret — eternally, in the same order, forever. Would you collapse and curse the demon? Or would you respond, "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine"?

The eternal recurrence is not a metaphysical theory; it is a diagnostic question. Live such that you could will the eternal repetition of this life — and you have lived well. Most of us, on first asking, find we cannot. Nietzsche asks us to face that and change the life.

The Übermensch

The Übermensch ("over-man," sometimes "superman") is the figure Zarathustra teaches at the start of his book. He is not a master race or a political tyrant — these are 20th-century distortions, eagerly exploited by Nietzsche's antisemitic sister Elisabeth and then by the Nazis. The Übermensch is the human being who, having seen through the death of God, has the strength to create new values — values that affirm the earth, the body, becoming, and life — rather than borrowing values from a transcendent realm.

Nietzsche knew most of us would not get there. He spoke of the "last man" as the more likely outcome of the death of God: a comfortable, risk-averse, distracted creature who blinks and says, "We have invented happiness." If you wonder whether Nietzsche saw 21st-century consumer society coming, the last man is a portrait that ought to make you uncomfortable.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Heidegger is the most technically demanding figure in this series, and the most morally compromised. His early masterpiece Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) reorganized 20th-century philosophy. His subsequent membership in the Nazi Party (joined 1933) and his refusal ever to publicly repent of it have permanently shadowed his reception. We must read him without forgetting either fact.

Dasein

Heidegger refuses the word "human being" because it is overloaded with metaphysical baggage. He uses Dasein — literally "being-there" — to name the entity each of us is. Dasein is the being for whom its own being is an issue; the being that asks the question of being.

Dasein is not a substance with a soul attached. It is, structurally, Being-in-the-world: from the start, with others, in a context of practical concerns, using tools that disappear into use ("ready-to-hand"), in a mood that discloses how things are mattering to us. Heidegger spends the first half of Being and Time patiently dismantling the Cartesian picture of an isolated mind looking out at an external world; for him, the world is not "out there" but the very medium of our being.

Das Man and Authenticity

We met das Man in Part 5. Heidegger's diagnosis: in our average everyday existence, we are not "I" but "one." We do what one does. We say what one says. The They lifts from us the burden of being ourselves, and in exchange takes from us the possibility of being ourselves. This is not a moral failure of bad people; it is the default mode of Dasein. The question is whether something can call us out of it.

Heidegger says yes: the call of conscience (which is silent and indeterminate, not a rule from above), and especially the anxiety that breaks through the They's chatter, can summon Dasein back to its ownmost possibility. To respond is to enter authentic existence (Eigentlichkeit, "ownedness").

Being-Toward-Death

The clinching analysis: we discussed Being-toward-death in Part 5. For Heidegger, owning one's death — grasping it as my ownmost, non-relational, certain, and indeterminate possibility — is the condition that integrates Dasein into a finite whole. A life that runs as if it had infinite tomorrows is dispersed, distracted, and inauthentic. A life that quietly knows the limit can choose its few decades.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986)

For decades, Beauvoir was treated as Sartre's brilliant companion. Recent scholarship has shown what her contemporaries already knew: she is an original existential philosopher in her own right, and on certain points (especially ethics and embodied freedom) she goes deeper than Sartre.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

Sartre had promised an existentialist ethics in Being and Nothingness and never delivered. Beauvoir delivered. The Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté) takes the existentialist starting point — radical freedom in a world without given values — and asks: what follows for how we should live with each other?

Her central insight: human existence is structurally ambiguous. We are body and consciousness, facticity and transcendence, in-the-world and projecting beyond it. To resolve the ambiguity in either direction is bad faith. Authentic ethics begins by accepting the ambiguity and acting from within it.

She then types the major ways people fail at this — the "sub-man" (refusing to project at all), the "serious man" (treating values as objective facts), the "nihilist" (denying all values), the "adventurer" (loving action without caring for ends), the "passionate man" (clinging to a single person or project as if it were absolute). Each is a form of evading the ambiguous human condition.

Authentic existence wills its own freedom and the freedom of others as the condition of its own. My freedom is not real if I exercise it against your freedom; the freedoms must reinforce each other or both collapse. This gives existentialism, for the first time, a clear ethical-political content: oppose oppression, support liberation, treat others as fellow free beings.

The Second Sex (1949)

Le Deuxième Sexe applies these ideas to one of the great existential injustices: the situation of women under patriarchy. Beauvoir's most famous line — "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient." ("One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.") — is a precise existentialist claim. There is no female essence; there is a long historical, social, and bodily process by which female humans are produced as the "Second Sex," constituted as the Other in relation to a male standard.

The book's force is its combination of philosophy, history, biology, literature, and lived experience. It is, unmistakably, the founding text of second-wave feminism, and it is also a sustained existential analysis of how an entire group can be talked into accepting an inauthentic identity over generations.

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

Kafka was not a philosopher; he was a Prague insurance lawyer who wrote at night, asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death from tuberculosis, and was thankfully ignored on that point. Brod saved The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, and gave the world an entirely new vocabulary for the absurd.

The Trial & the Bureaucratic Absurd

Der Process (The Trial, written 1914–15, published posthumously 1925) opens: "Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested." The novel follows K. through a year of interactions with a vast, opaque legal system that never quite tells him what he is accused of. He is shuffled from corridor to corridor, from official to official, none of whom can give him a clear answer. He is finally taken to a quarry and executed "like a dog."

Kafka anticipates a 20th-century absurd that the philosophers had not yet named: the absurdity not of the cosmos but of the system. Modern bureaucracy, modern law, modern administration produce situations in which no individual is responsible, no decision is locatable, and no human reason can be demanded. Camus would later write (in The Myth of Sisyphus) of "Kafka's logic, lucid and crushing," and use his work as a key example of absurd literature.

The Kafkaesque absurd is now everywhere — in immigration offices, in customer-service phone trees, in algorithmic content moderation, in the "denied for unclear reasons" emails that modern life produces. Kafka saw it coming.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)

Sartre called The Brothers Karamazov "the book of all books" for the existentialist. Camus said Dostoevsky was the great anatomist of the religious absurd. Nietzsche said reading Dostoevsky was "the happiest accident of my life." All four major existentialists read him obsessively.

Notes from Underground (1864)

Notes from Underground is often called the first existential novel. Its narrator, the unnamed Underground Man, is a retired civil servant in St. Petersburg, deeply intelligent, deeply spiteful, paralyzed by self-consciousness. He attacks the rationalist optimism of his time — the belief that, given enough enlightenment and enough material progress, humans will pursue their own happiness rationally and harmoniously.

Nonsense, says the Underground Man. Humans will, out of sheer perversity, choose the painful, the irrational, the destructive — precisely to assert that they are not the calculable cogs the rationalists take them to be. "Man is, in fact, mad." This is not a defense of malice; it is a defense of freedom, even at the price of self-destruction. The Underground Man is the first literary character who refuses to be reduced to a function — and he is, in his miserable way, the ancestor of every existential anti-hero.

The Grand Inquisitor

In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the atheist Ivan Karamazov tells his pious brother Alyosha a "poem" he has invented. Christ returns to Earth in 16th-century Seville. The Grand Inquisitor recognizes him, has him arrested, and visits him in his cell. The Inquisitor delivers a long monologue — Christ never speaks — accusing him of having loaded humanity with a burden it cannot carry: freedom.

People do not want freedom, says the Inquisitor. They want bread, miracle, mystery, authority. The Church has corrected Christ's mistake: it has taken back the freedom he gave and provided what people actually crave — security and certainty. At the end, Christ silently kisses the Inquisitor on his bloodless lips, and the Inquisitor lets him go.

The Grand Inquisitor is one of the most penetrating existential texts ever written, precisely because it is delivered by an opponent of freedom. The Inquisitor is a half-Sartrean figure: he sees the burden of radical freedom clearly, and concludes — out of pity, he says — that humans must be relieved of it. To say "no" to the Inquisitor is to insist, against all evidence about how much most of us want to escape it, that freedom is still worth its weight.