Basic Writings of Existentialism

by Gordon Marino (Editor)

Edited and with an Introduction by Gordon MarinoBasic Writings of Existentialism, unique to the Modern Library, presents the writings of key nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers broadly united by their belief that because life has no inherent meaning humans can discover, we must determine meaning for ourselves. This anthology brings together into one volume the most influential and commonly taught works of existentialism. Contributors include Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ralph Ellison, Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Anthologies, Psychology, Collections, Classics, Reference

530 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 13, 2004

About the author

Gordon Marino is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Professor Marino took his doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. Before coming to St. Olaf in 1995, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Virginia Military Institute.

A recipient of the Richard J. Davis Ethics Award for excellence in writing on ethics and the law, Marino is the author of Kierkegaard in the Present Age, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, and editor of the Modern Library’s Basic Writings of Existentialism and Ethics: The Essential Writings. In addition to his scholarly publications, Marino’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and many other national and international publications.

A former boxer, Dr. Marino has been a USA Boxing coach since 1995. He was the head coach of boxing at Virginia Military Institute and currently trains both amateurs and professionals in Minnesota. He is also an award-winning boxing writer for among other venues, the Wall Street Journal.

Reviews

[Rod · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're looking for a book that will lay out clearly what the philosophy of existentialism is, then this is not the book you're looking for. If, however, you want to wade through the words of the existentialists themsevles and decide for yourself what they're about, then this anthology presents wonderul material to consider. The works are grouped chronologically, giving an excellent view of the evolution of existentalist thought. It should be noted that a clear statment about what existentialism is and isn't can be found in Sartre's apologist essay "Existentialism," which is among the material in this volume.

[Sarah Fulton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kierkagard said that if we were to undermine living with our heart because we are too afraid of getting hurt, then the first thing to give up on should be love.

This idea was momentous to me in healing from heartbreak.... Never will I give up on love.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now I understand Barbie movie

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful, albeit mindbending (especially in the case of Kierkegaard's stuff) collection. Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr is one of the best stories I've ever read and earns the five stars alone, but the rest of the essays and stories are also excellent.

I wouldn't recommend it to people not heavily interested in philosophy, however. It's not an introductory text and does not contain explanatory material, like in a Norton paperback for example; Marino lets the texts speak for themselves, except in places where a foreign language is quoted or a particularly obscure or obsolete idea is brought up.

[Ashton]

De Beauvoir and Camus were my favourites, but this reader generally has its ups an downs.

[Miranda Brist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I worked my way through about half of these--until I felt my own existential crisis coming on, and realized that reading about existentialism made it worse. But, I know this will get more of my time eventually.

[no_more_color · Rating 3 out of 5]

tl;dr version: Read the stories by Unamuno, Dostoevsky, and Ellison. The other selections are so abstract that their arguments are incomprehensible.

In this anthology's introduction, editor Gordon Marino says that the reader will be "shaking hands" with several prominent figures in the existentialist tradition. As I read the book, I felt like a blind man groping for their hands while Marino, in exasperation, screamed, "No, his hand is to your left! No, your other left!" I did not connect with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, or de Beauvoir. The problem is clarity: each writer begins with an abstraction, such as Kierkegaard's "The self is a relation that relates itself to itself," and then, rather than clarifying the abstraction with concrete examples, continues to build layers of additional abstractions that confuse, rather than illuminate, the writer's position. "The self is a relation that relates itself to itself" might be a perfectly fine way to begin an argument. Unfortunately, Kierkegaard is never any clearer than that, so for me at least, the argument never moves beyond the baffling abstraction it begins with.

The more I read, the more it seemed as if these writers couldn't quite grasp what they were trying to say and, unable to pin their ideas down in concrete language, simply spewed abstract nonsense until they wore themselves out. However, the confusing nature of many of the selections may not be entirely the fault of their authors. Many of these writings, Kierkegaard's especially, appear to have been responses to other philosophers that Marino chose to leave out. Perhaps if the editor had included, for example, the works by Hegel that Kierkegaard was responding to, Kierkegaard's own positions might have been more understandable. On the other hand, I know a literature professor who regards Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, confusing as they are, as good writers, while a friend in a political philosophy class condemns Hegel as a man incapable of saying what he means. Perhaps Hegel's inclusion would have shed little light on Kierkegaard, and by extension, perhaps including more writers would have offered little additional clarity overall.

Ah, why am I dancing around the real problem? I suspect that I am simply too stupid to understand philosophy. This is the existential crisis that drew me to this book to begin with: I am smart enough to understand that life is pointless, but too stupid to understand the solution as presented in books such as this one. Much as I would like to quit writing this review now and drown my existential blues in intoxicating beverages, a sense of fairness compels me to mention that this book was not a complete loss for me. The literary selections by Unamuno, Dostoevsky, and Ellison make the book worthwhile. Each is beautifully told in its own unique way, though the standout is Unamuno's "Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr." This story captures a crisis of religious faith in simple but compelling prose. The other stories are excellent, too. I was already acquainted with one of my favorite Russian authors, Dostoevsky, and I plan to read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, represented in this collection by its prologue, as soon as my library can borrow a copy for me. If reading Kierkegaard and the other philosophers is like wearing fogged over eyeglasses into a blizzard and hoping for the best, reading Unamuno, Dostoevsky and Ellison is like sitting back in the heated passenger seat of a comfortable car, as each storyteller steers through the snow with deftness. Their characters' existential landscapes roll by through the defrosted windshield, and though we are safe in their skilled hands, when we press against the glass during difficult turns, the harshness of their worlds sting our palms.

[Mary Overton]

Kierkegaard, from "The Sickness unto Death":
There is a kind of despair in which the despairing person "not infrequently longs for solitude, which for him is a necessity of life, at times like the necessity to breathe, at other times like the necessity to sleep.... On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is the measure of what spirit there is. 'Utterly superficial nonpersons and group-people' have so little longing for solitude that, like lovebirds, they promptly die the moment they have to be alone. Just as a little child has to be lulled to sleep, so these people need the soothing lullaby of social life in order to be able to eat, drink, sleep, fall in love, etc. In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and a respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from it to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known other than as a punishment for criminals. But since it is a crime in our day to have spirit, it is indeed quite in order to classify such people, lovers of solitude, with criminals."
Kindle location 1473-83

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it for a class. Really interesting, and worth reading if you're into this sort of thing. It's not like a textbook or anything. It's doable. However, I do feel like if I wasn't learning the jargon in this book from the class, this book would've been much more difficult. There's a brief bio on each writer, but not any sort of explanation of the unique terms used by each philosopher, aside from when the philosopher themselves defines them (which doesn't always happen, or at least not clearly.) Nietzsche and Sartre were especially difficult.

But this is almost worth owning just for the fact that it contains the entirety of Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus. Plus everything else on top of that. I don't know if this is the best intro to this philosophy, but if you put in an effort you should be able to get through it.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The selection of works in here is really great, and reading them in the context of eachother helped to emphasize certain aspects and ideas that I might otherwise have missed, and definitely made the works more comprehensible and impressive.

My main complaint is that I think the Heidegger section would've been much improved by a more extensive glossary of some of the terms he uses. It felt like, taken out of context, a lot of the meaning behind the technical language he was using was going pretty far over my head. I ended up feeling the need to skip over a lot of that excerpt and will have to return to it after getting a better understanding of Heidegger from other sources.

[Vrixton Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean.... I got a D in the class, but I'm pretty sure I want to get a masters in Philosophy.
Best parts of the book:
-Kierkegaard
-Nietzsche
-Heidegger
-de Beauvoir
I want to say I read Sartre's essay, but I don't remember it at all

[Don Wentworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a near perfect introduction to existentialism. Each selection, rather than being simply representative of the philosopher herself, informs both the selection previous and prepares the reader for what is to follow, giving the anthology a flow which helps in understanding the roots, philosophers and major works within the field. Highly recommended for students and laypersons with an interest in existentialism as a philosophy and a way of life. Philosophers represented as follows:

Kierkegaard
Nietzsche
Dostoevsky
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo
Heidegger
Sartre
de Beauvoir
Camus
Ralph Ellison

~ Don Wentworth

[Baba Yaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

*paris hilton voice* hot

[Monty Circus · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Basic Writings" my ass.

Sample quote:

"A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself."

If that seems coherent to you, then you'll love this book. As for myself, I somehow soldiered on another couple of hundred pages before giving up completely, and as a last ditch attempt at this subject, picked up "Existentialism for Dummies". That did the trick. In hindsight, I'm really glad I didn't try majoring in philosophy. That would have been a waste of a semester.

[Deb DA Gerrald]

I avoided reading Kierkegaard on the first time through, and that was a wise choice on my part. Thus far, he has bogged me down considerably, with his inability to sever his belief in the wholly unprovable supernatural. That he spends so much time on the teleological nut of Abraham and the almost-sacrifice of Isaac is a great example of one of the greatest wastes of philosophical ink of all time. That he entitled the work in which he tucked this labor "Fear and Trembling" was enough to make me avoid it before. But alas, now that I've started it, I must continue.

[Jez Latham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this. The editor gives a good intro to the topic and then we have an interesting selection from some of the top boys in the field. doestoevsky, kierkegaard, nietzche, camus, sartre etc and not forgetting simone de beauvoir. it made me realize the large degree existentialism has influenced the ideas of you, me and the postman.

[Jessica Zu]

Heidegger is really difficult to translate. The author has done the best to balance clarity with authenticity. The selections of the essays are also very concise and representative. The author's forwards certainly make the reading process less strengueous by adding necessary socio-political contexts, cultural notes and scholarly take on difficult Heideggerian terms.

[Michael Ledezma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great introductory Kierkegaard section. The Heidegger selection was wholly inadequate as an introduction to his thought. Sartre was ok. De Beauvoir was a footnote. Could've done without the literary selections from Dostoevsky, de Unamuno, and Ralph Ellison, but that's just me.

[Liesl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm no expert on existentialism but I really enjoyed this volume. It seems like a good place to start. I particulary enjoyed reading the piece by Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, an author I wasn't at all familiar with before.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a good primer or refresher if it's been a while since you read these writers, but in the end you'll just want to go buy the original texts and read them in their entirety.

[Frank Allinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

As the title of this book suggests this is a collection of writings from the most famous writers of the existentialist movement. There is a page or two of information about each of their lives at the beginning of their sections but apart from that it concentrates on what they wrote. There is no explanation of what each of the philosophers were saying in their writing. That is of course for the reader to do.
If I said that I understood every word that they had written (Particularly the earlier philosophers included in this book such as Kierkegaard & Nietzsche) I would be lying. However as you can imagine there was plenty for me to think about contained in here. It was probably a mixture of my not fully understanding some parts of the book and thinking about what I had read in other parts which is why it took me so long to read this book. I suppose that is what a good philosophical book is supposed to do. Having said that if this is the Basic Writings of Existentialism I won’t be reading the more advanced stuff.

[Steve Ramsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection. Not that I enjoyed every article. In fact, in many cases, the value of the selection was to show me that some of the key existentialist writers are truly unreadable, even if you just skim off the best bits. (I'm thinking of Kierkegaard and Heidegger.) For similar reasons, though some of Sartre's writing is great, I've learned from this collection to avoid 'Being and Nothingness' at all costs.

So my five star rating is basically based on the selections from Camus (Myth of Sisyphus), Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground pt 1 and 'The Grand Inquisitor' chapter of The Brothers Karamazov), and one of the two selections from Sartre (an excerpt from 'Existentialism and Human Emotions'). These are easily enough to make the book worth buying.

[Renee Is A Reader]

I loved reading this as a parent of a middle school aged child for it expanded my awareness of myself as well as taught me to emphasize and relate to budding preteen. Sometimes as an adult you can't remember what it's like to grow as a person, to challenge pretensions, to debate against oneself, to feel futility in every action. Well the collections of writers in this book will remind any adult who forgot there aforementioned emotions. However, a parent will take the emotions as a way to understand and develop a personalized guide for their children. Parent is loosely defined as a person who spends an extreme amount of love, time, and energy guiding a child towards adulthood.

[Anakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved these philosophical readings. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Unamuno, and Sartre.
From these selected writings I would recommend "The Grand Inquisitor" and "Saint Manuel Martyr." Those 2 were by far my favorite.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bane of my existence senior fall. Basically just a bunch of old European guys rambling about life, but tbh it was pretty interesting to try to decode their words into ideas that actual humans can understand. 4/5

[Sophie Copple · Rating 2 out of 5]

The selections were solid but of course, with a collection like this you are going to be missing major pieces of context in the writing. Also some of the translations were questionable. But what do I know. I know nothing.

[Priscilla Sotelo Klisch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This selection provides a good general overview of existentialism and it's various themes. I picked this book up as a teenager and I've been interested in the topic ever since.

[Carolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the various sections of this book very much.

[Cassandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent text with the wide selection of the influential thinkers of existentialism,

[Terry Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some better than other - some left me clueless