Chapter 29 Further Reading: The Existentialist Challenge

Primary Sources — Start Here

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945/1996). The most accessible entry point into Sartre's thought — a transcription of his famous 1945 lecture, now published with essays and responses. Sartre defends existentialism against charges of pessimism and moral relativism, provides the clearest formulation of "existence precedes essence," and attempts to give existentialism an ethical foundation. Available free online through multiple academic sources. Read in one sitting: approximately 40 pages. Warning: Sartre says things here that his more rigorous work complicates; treat it as an introduction, not a summary.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942/2018 Vintage edition, trans. Justin O'Brien). The foundational text of Camusian absurdism. Read at minimum: the opening "An Absurd Reasoning" and the final section "The Myth of Sisyphus" itself. The middle sections (on Kafka, Kierkegaard, and others) are illuminating but denser. The O'Brien translation is the standard English version; read it in the Vintage edition for the clearest text. The book is short — under 150 pages — and some of the best philosophical prose of the twentieth century.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947/2018 Open Road edition, trans. Bernard Frechtman). Beauvoir's most systematic philosophical work, less well-known than The Second Sex but more directly philosophical. Chapters 1 and 2 ("Ambiguity and Freedom" and "Personal Freedom and Others") are essential reading for understanding how she extends and critiques Sartre. She argues that freedom is genuinely ambiguous — always situated, always in tension — and that the ethics of freedom requires the liberation of others. Approximately 150 pages.

Essential Secondary Sources

Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (2016). The best accessible narrative history of existentialism and its central figures. Bakewell weaves intellectual biography and philosophical exposition in equal measure, giving readers a vivid sense of who Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and Heidegger were as people while explaining what they thought and why it mattered. She is especially good on the complex relationships among the existentialists and on Heidegger's Nazism. Excellent for readers who want context as well as content. Highly recommended as a companion or first approach to the tradition.

Aronson, Ronald. Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (2004). A rigorous philosophical and biographical account of the most famous intellectual friendship and break of the twentieth century. Aronson shows how Camus and Sartre's political differences grew from genuine philosophical differences about the relationship between freedom, history, and violence. Essential for understanding what the political stakes of their philosophical disagreement were, and why it matters today.

Flynn, Thomas R. Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (2006, Oxford University Press). A compact (under 150 pages) scholarly overview that covers Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir with philosophical precision. Better for those with some philosophical background. Part of the Oxford "Very Short Introductions" series, which is uniformly excellent.

Primary Texts: The Philosophical Works

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (1943/2021 Washington Square Press edition, trans. Hazel Barnes). Sartre's major philosophical work — 700 pages of dense phenomenological analysis. Not the place to start, but essential for understanding bad faith, facticity, transcendence, and the being-for-itself/being-in-itself distinction in full rigor. Read at minimum: Part II, Chapter 2 ("Bad Faith") — approximately 70 pages — which is among the most extraordinary sustained philosophical analyses in the twentieth century.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (1949/2011 Vintage edition, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier). The foundational work of feminist existentialism. The Introduction ("Woman as Other") and the opening of Volume I ("Destiny: The Data of Biology") and Volume II ("Childhood") are essential. This new translation is more accurate than the earlier Parshley translation, which significantly abridged the original. Approximately 800 pages in full — the Introduction and first two chapters of Volume II are the most philosophically essential for this course.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (1927/2010 SUNY edition, trans. Joan Stambaugh). The most important and most difficult text in the existentialist tradition. Division I, Chapters 4 and 5 (on being-in-the-world and das Man) and Division II, Chapters 1 and 2 (on being-toward-death and conscience) are the most relevant to this course. This is genuinely difficult philosophy; the Stambaugh translation is more accurate than Macquarrie/Robinson but also more spare. Consider reading with a secondary guide.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling (1843/2006 Cambridge edition, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh). The most important of Kierkegaard's existentialist texts — a sustained meditation on Abraham and Isaac that culminates in the concept of the "teleological suspension of the ethical." Under 150 pages. Written pseudonymously (as "Johannes de Silentio") and uses literary rather than argumentative strategies throughout. The Evans/Walsh Cambridge edition has the best scholarly introduction.

Fiction: The Philosophical Novels

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea (1938). Sartre's philosophical novel — the account of Antoine Roquentin's dawning awareness of the contingency of existence and the absence of necessary meaning. The "nausea" is the visceral sensation of confronting a world stripped of human meaning-impositions. Less explicitly philosophical than Being and Nothingness but often more illuminating.

Camus, Albert. The Stranger (1942/1989 Vintage edition, trans. Matthew Ward). The Ward translation is widely considered the best English version — capturing Camus's famously flat, clear prose better than earlier translations. Meursault's confrontational indifference to social convention reads differently after understanding the absurdist framework. Under 125 pages. One of the most read French novels of the twentieth century.

Camus, Albert. The Plague (1947/2020 Vintage edition, trans. Laura Marris). The Marris translation (2020) is significantly better than earlier English versions. The novel enacts solidarity in the face of meaningless suffering — the ethical center of Camusian revolt. Essential for understanding how absurdism becomes an ethics of commitment rather than an excuse for withdrawal.

For the Philosophical Specialist

Crowell, Steven (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (2012, Cambridge University Press). Scholarly essays on all major figures; essential for graduate-level engagement.

Gardner, Sebastian. Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" (2009, Continuum). Best single-volume guide to Sartre's major work.

Gothlin, Eva. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" (1996). Essential for understanding Beauvoir's philosophical originality independent of Sartre.