Existentialism defined as, 'a movement on post war arts/ culture especially in France and USA' heavily influencing music, theatre and literature as well as having a huge influence on today's society. It has many links with Freud, pheneomenology and drugs.
Drugs were very popular and it could almost be said they were thought of as 'cool' during the time when Edie Sedgwick (the model on the board at the beginning of the lecture) was a well known poster girl. Tom Woolfe's 'New Journalism' has many references to drugs, LSD in particular
JP Sartre's 'Existentialism in Humanism' discussed how we can rate the freedom of society by how free its journalists are. Sartre was a follower of Heidegger and Husserll. He agreed that life has no essence, it is only 'becoming'.
Being and Nothingness:
Sartre's 3 categories:
'Things in themselves'- we are bound by facility and natural objects constantly change e.g. trees and rivers. They decay over time, and according to Sartre this makes us feel sick. Yet his answer is that we must face up to it. As Camus says, Decay is the theme of art influenced by existentialism.
'Things for themselves'- self-determining/ self-creating. Free people, these do not included women, children or uneducated people.
'Things for others'- Slaves/wives/people living for somebody else. Theses people/objects live in bad faith. This is similar to Heidegger's authenticity- artificial life.
Criticism of this would be that it is only an idealistic re-working of Marxism, where the bourgouise= "the determined" and the proletariat= "the others".
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