"Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed?" -Jeremiah "Existentialism" today refers to faddism, decadentism, morbidity, the "philosophy of the graveyard"; to words like fear, dread, anxiety, anguish, suffering, aloneness, death; to novelists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoievski, Camus, Kafka; to philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Jaspers, and Sartre-and because it refers to, and is concerned with, all of these ideas and persons, existentialism has lost any clearer meaning it may have originally possessed. Because it has so many definitions, it can no longer be defined. As Sartre writes: "Most people who use the word existentialism would be em barrased if they had to explain it, since, now that the word is all the rage, even the work of a musician or painter is being called existentialist. A gossip columnist . . . signs himself The Exis tentialist, so that by this time the word has been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all. " 2 This state of definitional confusion is not an accidental or negligible matter. An attempt will be made in this introduction to account for the confustion and to show why any definition of existentialism in volves us in a tangle. First, however, it is necessary to state in a tenta tive and very general manner what points of view are here intended when reference is made to existentialism.

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

"First published in French in 1943 Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Être et le Néant is one of the greatest philosophical works of the twentieth century. In it, Sartre offers nothing less than a brilliant and radical account of the human condition. The English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote to a friend of "the excitement - I remember nothing like it since the days of discovering Keats and Shelley and Coleridge". What gives our lives significance, Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, is not pre-established for us by God or nature but is something for which we ourselves are responsible. Combining this with the unsettling view that human existence is characterized by radical freedom and the inescapability of choice, Sartre introduces us to a cast of ideas and characters that are part of philosophical legend: anguish; the 'bad faith' of the memorable waiter in the café; sexual desire; and the 'look' of the other, brought to life by Sartre's famous description of someone looking through a keyhole. Above all, by arguing that we alone create our values and that human relationships are characterized by hopeless conflict, Sartre paints a stark and controversial picture of our moral universe and one that resonates strongly today. This new translation includes a helpful Translator's Introduction, notes on the translation, a comprehensive index and a foreword by Richard Moran."--Book jacket.

Being and NothingnessSean-Paul SarteBest-seller modern existentialism book