Main Traits of Existentialism
Existentialism is a term which has been applied to the work of a number of late 19th and 20th century philosophers who shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject — the thinking subject, the acting, feeling, living human individual. In the broader sense existentialism is a 20th century philosophy that is centered upon the analysis of existence and of the way humans find themselves existing in the world.
In simpler terms, existentialism is a philosophical theory concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. Personal choices become unique without the necessity of an objective form of truth. A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence.
The 19th-century philosophers Sören Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are widely regarded as the fathers of existentialism. Existentialists believe that a person should be forced to choose and be responsible without the help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions.
Existentialism takes into consideration the underlying concepts:
Human free will.
Human nature is chosen through life choices.
A person is best when struggling against their individual nature, fighting for life.
Decisions are not without stress and consequences.
There are things that are not rational.
Personal responsibility and discipline is crucial.
Society is unnatural and its traditional religious and secular rules are arbitrary.
Worldly desire is futile.
Prominent existentialists include Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus. The main target of Kierkegaard's writings was the idealist philosophical system of Hegel which excluded the inner subjective life of living human beings.
Martin Heidegger in Being and Time presented a method of rooting philosophical explanations in human existence to be analysed in terms of existential categories (existentiale); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the existentialist movement.
Sartre became the best-known proponent of existentialism, exploring it not only in theoretical works such as Being and Nothingness, but also in plays and novels. Many critics argue Sartre's philosophy is contradictory. Specifically, they argue that Sartre makes metaphysical arguments despite his claiming that his philosophical views ignore metaphysics.
Main Characteristics of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism
Structuralism is a theory of analyzing phenomena chiefly characterized by contrasting the elemental structures of the phenomena in a system of binary opposition, contrasts, and hierarchical structures. Structuralism emerged as a dominant intellectual paradigm in France in the late 1950s in response to the existentialist emphasis on subjectivity and individual autonomy—personified in the work and person of Jean-Paul Sartre. Structuralism attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. Broadly speaking, structuralism holds that all human activity and its products, even perception and thought itself, are constructed and not natural, and in particular that everything has meaning because of the language system in which we operate. It is closely related to Semiotics, the study of signs, symbols and communication, and how meaning is constructed and understood.
There are four main common ideas underlying structuralism as a general theory: firstly, every system has a structure; secondly, the structure is what determines the position of each element of a whole; thirdly, "structural laws" deal with coexistence rather than changes; and fourthly, structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.
Structuralism is widely regarded to have its origins in the work of the Swiss linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 - 1913), but it soon came to be applied to many other fields, including philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, literary theory and even mathematics. In the early 20th century, Saussure developed a science of signs based on linguistics (semiotics or semiology). He held that any language is just a complex system of signs that express ideas, with rules which govern their usage. He called the underlying abstract structure of a language, "langue", and the concrete manifestations or embodiments, "parole". He concluded that any individual sign is essentially arbitrary and that there is no natural relationship between a signifier (e.g. the word “dog") and the signified (e.g. the mental concept of the actual animal).
The philosopher Michel Foucault, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - ), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981), the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980), the linguists Roman Jakobson (1896 - 1982) and Noam Chomsky (1928 - ), the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980), the Marxist theorists Louis Althusser (1918 - 1990) and Nicos Poulantzas (1936 - 1979) were all instrumental in developing the theory and techniques of Structuralism, most of this development occurring in France.
In the 1960's, the structuralist movement attempted to synthesise the ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. They disagreed with the existentialists' claim that each man is what he makes himself. For the structuralist the individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic structures over which he/she has no control, but which could be uncovered by using their methods of investigation.
A positivism of structuralism soon came under fire by post-structuralism, a wide field of thinkers, some of whom were once themselves structuralists, but later came to criticize it. Post-structuralists criticised structuralism for its rigidity and ahistoricism. Structuralists believed they could analyze systems from an external, objective standing, but the post-structuralists argued that this is incorrect, that one cannot transcend structures and thus analysis is itself determined by what it examines, that systems are ultimately self-referential. Despite this, many of structuralism's proponents, such as Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence on continental philosophy. Many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's critics who have been associated with "post-structuralism" are a continuation of structuralism.
Originally labelled a structuralist, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault came to be seen as the most important representative of the post-structuralist movement. He agreed that language and society were shaped by rule governed systems, but he disagreed with the structuralists on two counts. Firstly, he did not think that there were definite underlying structures that could explain the human condition and secondly he thought that it was impossible to step outside of discourse and survey the situation objectively.