Existentialism Books

Jean-Paul Sartre was the undisputed giant of philosophy throughout the sixties and seventies. His relationship to poststructuralists has been widely discussed in reference to the political upheavals which led to '68 and the reforms borne thereof. However, since the absorption of existentialist tenets and the eclipsing of its philosophical mood we've come to reassess Sartre as an intellectual of a bygone era. Many a time there have been revival attempts in his regard, none of which have had much success or pertinence, save, perhaps, Fredric Jameson's use of his attitude towards a materialist subject culturally bound to a being of facticity. Finally, here comes an assessment that defines the French philosophe within the postmodern realm. Nik Farrell Fox aptly analyzes Sartre's entire oeuvre, from the thirties to the seventies, with particular emphasis on "Being and Nothingness" and "The Critique of Dialectical Reason". The author does not stretch Sartre's philosophical ingenuity nor does he undermine the political circumscription by hindsight awarded him. So the question posed, treated, and deconstructed by Fox is "What is Sartre's place, relevance, and influence within Postmodernism?" As a sociologist the interpretation is intellectually acute, theoretically outstanding, and rhetorically compelling. His emphasis on Sartre's analytical reasoning, dialectical circularity between praxis and inertia through a Marxist visual, and the Hegelian thrust inherited by existentialism proves to be a vindication for a thinker who we have laid aside prematurely. The irony, a postmodern trademark indeed, is that amid the differences and similarities between two French philosophical schools of thought, Fox finds the more recent one lagging in terms of political engagement. A timely read and a bedeviled exposition that raises a fearless daunting and enterprising discourse to the surface of a postmodern sea which had done its most, by way of neglect, to wash to other shores a thinker we must not ignore. Herein lies the force and urgency of this book, fun, exciting, invigorating, and radical. Not an elegy, but by all means, not an epitaph either. Sartre is alive and breathing, his specter haunting the scene and the "event" we are presently living through a violent death of subjectivity. This is an informative book and a must read.

What you will get in this set are: Birth of Tragedy, The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Human All too Human (I), Gay Science (book 5), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Case of Wagner, Twilight of Idols, Ecce Homo, Dionysos-Dithyramben. All are in German. Though it doesn't exhaust the books by Nietzsche, not even does it cover all the major works ( Actually, I am a bit disappointed about not having The Geneology of Moral(s) in this set), I think it is still worthwhile. You can learn not only philosophy from Nietzsche but also his writing style (in german, of course). As it is well-known that Nietzsche wrote beautiful german which are mostly distorted or missed out after translated into other languages.

This book reminds me of Hesse (Peter Camenzind, The Glass Bead Game, Beneath the Wheel) merged with Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the former because of the growth of the young man and the erudtion, and the latter for the criticism of mass man with the character Lawrence rising above the mass man (is this an example of the ubermensch?). But the book differs from those authors in a unique way, and can also be considered the anti-thesis of Rand's Galt Gulch. Instead of gathering together the elite producers of mankind in a new world, promising a better tomorrow for man, Pierce's character Lawrence eradicates the elite intellectuals, hoping to remove all chances of man overcoming his present defeating condition, and allowing mankind every chance it can to destroy itself, an outcome which the collective actions of mankind seem destined towards.

Days later after finishing the book, I'm still trying to figure out if I can find a way to be uplifted by the book, or if the ultimately negative tone regarding mans' fate is to prevail. Does the work serve as a criticism of the mass man, pointing out the absurdities and some disturbing predictions for his future, or does it more simply predict damnation for all men, with the multitude overwhelming the small lot of thinking men? I'd like to find a way to let the critical man, the ubemensch, whatever he is, succeed despite the obstacles mass man erects. That's more along my world-view, but I don't know that that intersects with Pierce's view, and whether or not I'm trying to shoe-horn my views onto the book.

Some of my favorite quotes:
"Man like cattle defines himself by his brands" (p. 112)

"... all of us do have wings, yet most never fly" (p. 1)

"... instead of hunting bare footed in packs they shopped in Super Walmarts, drove in cars, and in the midst of gas stoves, forgot what flint was." (p. 152)

A Detective Story about Life and Death (and Governance Behind them)

Does philosophy exist to prepare us to death? Socrates thought so. Death plays a central role in conceptual edifice of arguably most profound philosopher of the 20th century -Martin Heidegger and all of Eastern philosophical outlook. We are finite but our life's projects (whatever they are) are manifestly not, raising a question of how our life continues after death. Death, in short, provides a revealing perspective on life.

This book is about governance - a set of principles and rules which spans many lifetimes. Politics, by contrast is petty in a sense that is done by politicians confined, by definition, to their own life-time. It explores four tropes - common threads of how statesmen strive for transcendence of political projects of their lives.

For only slightly initiated like myself (I am an economist) the book reads like a detective story. An exposition is at once lucid, panoramic and focused, and it is an easy ready for anyone with some familiarity (and perhaps admiration for) Heidegger, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and many other sources on which the book relies in its narrative. It galvanizes and sheds an unexpected light your prior knowledge (and this is why the book reads like a detective story) -- it is like putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.


Given my claim of a detective story, giving out any clues would spoil the reading, so here is examples of how the book helped me - an economist - articulate a richer perspective on my own work. I often work with what might be called 'strategic first movers' -- individuals thinking and doing things against the established canons and traditions. For instance, it was fascinating to talk during my recent trip to Chile to seasoned 'overachievers' -- people who went through Pinochet ordeal, left the country, became highly successful abroad and now reached the point which Lev Tolstoy (quoted in the book) reached by the age of about 55 -- 'what next', what is a new agenda in life. Professional success, seductive as it is, is taken as given so the transcendence itself becomes the next challenge. Using their reputation and other resources, those `overachievers' engage in institutional development in their home country and that becomes the next stage in their lives. On a much grander scale (French president C de Gaulle is discussed in the book as an example) it becomes a third trope of dealing with death the author calls `preparations'.


Although in the modern world ' sovereign life exists with its back to the wall, suffocating from the stench of conformity, vulgarity, and received opinion' (p.97 of the book , first paragraph from above), there always willing or having the luxury of being different from others. Understanding motivations of such exceptions is paramount for purely pragmatic and mundane reasons - how to change things, even only a little bit, in the conditions not precisely conducive for such a change. The book, although asking grand questions of death, life and governance, sheds a new light on this question and deserved to be peaked into or perhaps even read by people outside sociology and philosophy.

And this is, in my book, the highest praise any book can get (no pun intended). A Soviet philosopher Mamardashivili (I am also a Russian) once noticed that reading is usually intellectualized to an unhealthy degree. Experience of reading a book is no different than other mundane experiences such as talking to a friend or taking a stroll in the forest: it is just another glimpse at our own mirror which helps us to grasp what we are and what we do.

Durant asked prominent people of his time "What is the meaning of life" The answers he received are in this tiny paperback. Anything Will and Ariel wrote are worth your time, and H.L. Mencken's reply is absolutely worth the pittance spent for this book.

Se opina que la filosofía versa sobre cuestiones abstractas, alejadas de lo concreto, excesivamente elevadas. Este libro refuta tal creencia. Su tema es la existencia de todos los días. La ontología, que aborda el ser, recae sobre la vida. Ser, por lo pronto, no es sino vida. Hablar de filosofía de la vida -dirá Heidegger en Ser y Tiempo-, es como hablar de botánica de las plantas. Facticidad, simplificando, equivale a cotidianidad, es decir, precisamente, a lo más cercano; tanto, que justamente por eso no reparamos en ella, y tendemos a pasarla por alto al reflexionar sobre nosotros mismos. En Heidegger la filosofía visita a domicilio, decía Ortega, según cuenta José Gaos en sus Confesiones profesionales. Hermenéutica es, en postrera instancia, la autointerpretación de la vida. Todos somos hermeneutas -sin saberlo con conciencia clara y aparte-, en cuanto, necesariamente, interpretamos nuestra propia existencia para poder vivir. Por cierto, esta interpretación no la realizamos de manera deliberada, explícita, temática ni rigurosamente conceptual. La tarea del autor es transformar filosóficamente la hermenéutica que de su propia existencia efectúa cada uno de los hombres, dándole un rango "científico", esto es, asignándole rigor y sistematismo. La hermenéutica de Heidegger tendría por tarea primordial despertarnos desde el estado somnolente y sonambúlico inherente a nuestra cotidianidad mediana, regular. En cualquier caso, queda establecido con nitidez que la vida misma es el instrumento de la interpretación, de la hermenéutica, planteamiento asumido, con diversos matices diferenciales, por Ortega, Paul Ricoeur y Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Stephen Houlgate has written a marvelous book. It is a clear, well-written intro to one of the most complex thinkers ever.
First Houlgate gives an explanation of Hegel's basic aims and presuppositions and evaluates them, one by one. Then comes the text of the beginning of Hegel's "Logic" - both in German and English - and the discussion of it.
Houlgate's book surely makes Hegel's philosophy less frightening! I'd recommend it, along with Burbidge's "The Logic of Hegel's Logic", as an ideal starting point for anyone struggling to understand Hegel's thought.

A lecture course that eventually became the famous Kantbuch, Heidegger demonstrates his remarkable capacity to think in complete sentences. The reading of Kant is decidedly Aristotlizing, with the priority of the imagination (phantasia) over reason (nous) or sense (aisthesis), and the priority of imagination cannot be separated from the priority of time, the gift which is self giving (or in Kant, self-affection: masturbation). The most clever thing that H does, and which he refrains from in the Kantbuch, is to turn the categories (quantity, quality, modality, and something else) into emanations of past, present, future. H reads modern philosophy as the triumph of the imagination, and that is no clearer than in Kant, but for Heidegger, the future possesses a priority, and the future is "image-poor." The connection of imagination with manipulation (and potentiality) leads some (like Sartre) to identify imagination with negativity, but H wants no part of this "humanism." Imagination and time may possess a priority that Kant "recoils" from, but H demonstrates the reductio in Kant's argument not to valorize imagination but ironically to resuscitate aisthesis, or the potentia passiva, the ability or power to receive, to listen intently, or just to listen.

Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" is easily one of the most important philosophical books ever written. If you study it for a while (and it takes quite a while to get more than a superficial grasp of what is going on in this dense but remarkable text), you will eventually want to work on the original German. The version put out by Philosophische Bibliothek is a small, handy volume that is inexpensive and not too hard to get hold of. It has a fairly decent index, and a fairly extensive bibliography of some of the more important scholarship on the book in the past several decades. While the paragraphs are not numbered, the paragraphs do match the numbering in Miller's translation of the Phenomenology, and it just takes a few (very worthwhile) hours to number the paragraphs in this version so that they can be correlated and compared with the most well-known English translation. An essential book for graduate students in philosophy and others who have a more than casual interest in one of the four most important philosophers (at least to my mind: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel form a pantheon).

I liked this book. It discusses a part of the Phenomenology movement not often thought about and, in doing so, makes you reflect on how philosophy should be carried out in the future.