what you don't know about what you know might shock you...

And herein lies one of the strange paradoxes of twentieth-century thought.  In the decades after the Second World War existentialism was the philosophy of choice for many cultured and artistic people, as well as those who self-consciously rebelled against social conformity.  It was a philosophy that translated well into literature and theatre: it could be worn like a garment, identified with the cafe society led by Sartre in Paris.  It was above all, a philosophy and style that promoted the individual, freeing him or her from social conformity.  It was the antidote to the depression of living in a Europe so recently crippled  by the Nazis and the war....

 

....what the average amateur existentialist, enthusing freedom into the small hours in the heady days of the 1950's or 1960's would have made of the founding fathers of such philosophy remains a mystery: Kierkegaard, an intense nineteenth-century religious thinker, for whom seriousness counted; Nietzsche, who, had he lived to see it, would hardly have regarded cafe life as heralding the arrival of the Ubermenschen; Heidegger, traditional Catholic right-winger! Only after Sartre had come to its rescue could existentialism become fashionable along with sexual freedom and left-wing politics.

 

                                                                      -- Niegel Rodgers and Mel Thompson  p.153 "Philosophers Behaving Badly"

Posted via email from Jim Nichols