I do not envy this author’s task. Pulling together the diverse strands of existentialist (and proto-existentialist) thought into a coherent and concise introduction is a tall order, made even taller by the poor constraints that this Oxford series places on authors (<200 pages, reduction-through-citation-sparsity, needless double paragraph spacing, useless biographical callouts and pictures, etc). Although Flynn manages to work within these constraints, I fear that his work here still suffers needlessly from it. Too often thoughts trail off; thinkers are introduced and then abandoned for several pages, and in some cases, several chapters; concepts are well elaborated here, but unhelpfully combined and condensed there. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what Flynn had achieved here — a genuine overview of this complex topic — it’s just that I can’t help but think that with more rounds of reviews and feedback, he could have balanced out the inconsistencies, for these inconsistencies are of the the sort that they are hard for the writer to see; they must be seen through the readers eyes.
Highlights of this book for me include:
the proto-existentialist thoughts of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the uncertain and uncommon task of becoming an authentic individual — including Kierkegaard’s exploration of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions of life, and Nietzsche’s complex concept of individual freedom, and its paradoxical relation to his philosophy of determinism
Camus’s mantra that hope lies in the Sisyphean recognition that there is no hope; in the Nietzchian turning of the “it was” into the “I willed it”; in the Sartrean humanism credo that “you can always make something of what you have been made into” — and the juxtaposition of that with the spiritual existentialism of Gabriel Marcel, and his contention that genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, “hope springing from humility and not from pride”, a concept also related to the “philosophical faith” of the existentialist and psychologist Karl Jaspers: the awareness of the “Transcendence” of “Existenz”, of the limit situations in suffering, guilt, and death that transcend our rational conceptualizations.
The exploration of ethics in relation to existentialism, the nature of choice and valuing in a metaphysically ungrounded realm, the ethically problematizing nature of Heideggarian and Sartrean authenticity
The sometimes tense, sometimes complementary relationship between early to mid twentieth century existentialist thought and the late twentieth century developments in poststructuralism, including the tensions between the uncentering of the subject from language in structuralism and poststructuralism and the historicity of understanding as the hermeneutical Being of the human condition in existentialism
There’s plenty to consider in this work, despite its flaws, and I recommend it for anyone interested in launching into this broad topic.