SHORT NOTES
The crux of Existentialism is
Human Freedom, the freedom of the living human individual. The movement that
was both literary and philosophical saw an individual as the basic entity of
society who was in command of the world around him and acted freely and
responsibly to find his place in society.
For an existentialist, individual
and not organized society or religion was the centre of the whole existence. For
him, the authenticity in life meant living individually, an existence that
didn't owe to society or religion.
Existentialism worked on the
concept of 'me Vs them' or 'individual Vs the society' and firmly believed in an
individual's supremacy rejecting the established philosophical notions as too
abstract and detached and thus showed disorientation and tension an individual
had with existing norms revolving around with themes like life and death, freedom,
existence and bondage, anxiety and authenticity, angst and despair and so on.
Basically called a 20th
Century philosophy and used by French philosopher and legend Jean-Paul Sartre
to describe himself, though he once famously said “Existentialism? I don’t know
what that is”, it had its roots in the works of 19th Century philosophers Friedrich
Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard.
Existentialism gave rise to a
cultural movement in 1940s and 50s Europe in the post World War II period and
Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean Wahl, Gabriel Marce, José
Ortega y Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno, Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov were the
major Existentialists the movement produced.
©SantoshChaubey
