EXISTENTIALISM, is a philosophy and a cultural impulse, with roots in ancient Socratic and Biblical thought, that became a conspicuous, self-conscious movement in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Existentialism embraces a variety of styles and convictions. However, its one constant characteristic, as indicated by the origin of the word, is concern for human existence, especially for the affirmation of freedom and the refusal to subordinate personal self-awareness to abstract concepts or dehumanizing social structures. It represents rebellion against established ideas and institutions that inhibit personal freedom and negate responsibility. The equivalent term for “existentialism” is found in German (existenzialismus) and in French (L’existentialisme).

存在主义，是一种哲学和文化的冲动，起源于古代苏格拉底和圣经的思想，在19世纪和20世纪成为了一种引人注目的，自觉运动。存在主义包含各种样式和信念。然而，它有一个不变的特征，正如该词的本源所提示的那样，是对人类存在，尤其是对自由的维护和拒绝将个人自我意识服从于抽象概念或丧失人性的社会结构。它代表了对限制个人自由和否定责任的固有观念和体系的反抗。在德语（existenzialismus）和法语（L’existentialisme）中都能找到“存在主义”这个词的同义词。

Kierkegaard.  SØren Kierkegaard, a 19^th century Danish philosopher and theologian, was the founder of modern existentialism. It is true that he had a host of forerunners and that the entire romantic movement of his century shared in the protest against the dominant rationalism of the 17ththe and 18^th centuries. Yet it was Kierkegaard who established the concepts and vocabulary that influenced subsequent existentialists. He criticized reigning philosophy for their abstract speculations and their pretensions to answer grand questions without even asking the immediate questions of self-understanding. “Truth is subjectivity,” declared Kierkegaard—meaning not that subjective illusions are true but that truth is meaningful only as it applies to a personal subject. On his understanding of existence, Kierkegaard emphasized the dizziness of freedom as man decides his destiny and the anxiety of the contingent being who can find no meaning in the universe except as he makes a “leap” of faith.

克尔凯郭尔。索伦·克尔凯郭尔，一位19世纪丹麦的哲学家和神学家，是现代存在主义的创立者。确实，他有许多先行者，而且在他的世纪中整个浪漫主义运动参与了反抗17世纪和18世纪占主导地位的理性主义。然而，是克尔凯郭尔建立了影响后来存在主义者的概念和词汇。他批评主流哲学的抽象思辨，并且批评借口回答了宏大问题，却不过问甚至迫在眉睫的自我理解的问题。克尔凯郭尔公开声明“真理就是主观性”—这并不意味主观幻想是真实的，而是说真理只有当它适用于个人主题时才有意义。关于他对存在的理解，克尔凯郭尔强调，人在决定其命运时自由的晕眩和偶然存在的焦虑，在宇宙中无法找到任何意义，除非他做出信仰之“跃”。

Kierkegaard attacked theology for its reliance on authority as an evasion of personal responsibility, for its timidity in commitment, and for its enslavement to the conventional church. He declared passionate paganism superior to complacent orthodoxy, and he called his fellow Lutherans to “contemporaneity with Christ,” by which he meant sharing the suffering of Christ. His final writings were a burning polemic against the established Danish church.

克尔凯郭尔攻击神学，因为它依赖权威，逃避个人责任，因为它在承诺中的胆怯和对传统教派的奴役。他公开声明狂热的异教要优于自满的正统，而且他将他的路德教同伴称为“与基督同时代”，他的意思是分担基督的苦难。他最后的作品是与确立已久的丹麦教会的激烈争论。

One of Kierkegaard’s beliefs, important to the future of existentialism, was that significant truth can be communicated only indirectly. It arises out of existential experience. The communicator may evoke or provoke awareness of truth, but he cannot tell another what to believe. Kierkegaard’s own literary works, often published under pseudonyms, included parables, diaries, and dialogues, frequently written with brilliant wit, caustic polemic, or prayerful devotion. Since Kierkegaard, existentialist communication has frequently taken the forms of fiction, drama, poetry, and visual arts.

克尔凯郭尔的信仰之一，对存在主义的未来很重要，就是重要的真理只能间接地传达。它源于存在的体验。交流者可以唤起或激起对真理的意识，但他无法告诉他人该相信什么。因为克尔凯郭尔自己的文字作品常以机智犀利、刻薄的争辩或虔诚的奉献写成，常常以假名出版，包括预言、日记和对话。自克尔凯郭尔以来，存在主义者的交流经常以小说、戏剧、诗歌和视觉艺术的形式出现。

Other 19^th Century Influences.  THREE other 19^th century figures shaped the existentialist impulse, although none of them called himself an existentialist. Fyodor Dostoyevsky in tempestuous novels turned his wrath against mechanistic and utilitarian beliefs. Although aware of the catastrophic consequences of human evil, he celebrated man’s freedom and explored the boundaries of faith and unbelief. Karl Mars opposed the individualistic tendency of existentialism and, to the extent that he was an economic determinist, denied its belief in freedom. But the existentialist spirit surfaced in his descriptions of alienation, his analysis of thinking as always imbedded in a historical context, and his call to philosophy to change the world instead of merely understanding it. Friedrich Nietzsche hailed the “unique wonder” of every person, often stifled by a cowardly herd-morality. His atheistic declaration that the churches are the tombs of God was curiously akin to Kierkegaard’s intensely Christian polemic against the churches.

19世纪其他人的影响。19世纪另外三个人物塑造了存在主义者的冲动，虽然他们没有称自己是存在主义者。费奥多尔·陀思妥耶夫斯基用暴风雨般的小说把他的愤怒转向了机械的和功利主义信仰。尽管意识到人类罪恶的灾难性后果，但他赞美了人类的自由，并探寻了信仰和不信仰的边界。卡尔·马克思反对这种存在主义的个人倾向，在这个意义上，他是个经济决定论者，否定它对自由的信仰。但存在主义者的精神却在他对异化感的描述中，在他对始终植根于历史语境的思维分析中，以及在他称为改变世界，而不只是理解世界的哲学中浮现出来。弗里德里希·尼采赞扬的每个人的“独特奇迹”常常被怯懦的群体道德所压制。他的无神论宣言，教堂是上帝的坟墓与克尔凯郭尔对教会强烈的基督教争论出奇地类似。

The 20^th Century.  Existentialism remained part of the philosophic underground throughout the 19^th century. But following World War I, which shook the confident rationalism of Western culture, it found its milieu. Kierkegaard’s works, translated into German (and into English in the 1930’s) had a wide response, intensified by other creative thinkers who explored some of the same themes.

20世纪。纵观19世纪，存在主义一直是地下哲学的一部分。但在一次大战后，它动摇了西方文化自信的理性主义，找到了它的环境。克尔凯郭尔的著作被翻译成德语（在20世纪30年代也被译成英语）产生了广泛的反应，并通过探索某些相同主题的其他创造性思想者得以加强。

Martin Heidegger of German, steeped in classical philosophy and, like Nietzsche, in the pre-Socratic philosophers, undertook a basically ontological exploration. But rather than analyzing nonhuman being, as much of the ontological tradition had done, he began with human existence, especially the experiences of anxiety, temporality, and awareness of death. His Being and Time became one of the major works of existentialist literature. Subsequently, Heidegger became interested particularly in the poets Hölderlin and Rilke and undertook studies in the relation of language to being.  Some critics interpret Heidegger as an atheist; others, as mystic. He has described himself as “waiting for God.”

德国的马丁·海德格尔，专注于古典哲学，并且像尼采一样专注于苏格拉底之前的哲学家中进行基本的本体论探究。但他并未像本体论传统那样分析非人类的存在，而是从人类的存在开始，尤其是对焦虑、临时性和对死亡意识的经验探究。他的《存在与时间》成为了存在主义文献重要的著作之一。后来，海德格尔特别对诗人荷尔德林和里尔克感兴趣，从事对语言与存在关系的研究。一些评论家将海德格尔解释为一个无神论者；其它人为神秘主义者。他将自己解释成“在等待上帝”。

Karl Jaspers, whose career moved through medicine and psychiatry to philosophy, had a scientific interest lacking in most existentialists. But he maintained the existentialist conviction, drawn from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, that all fundamental thinking depends upon self-comprehension. Although skeptical of religious orthodoxies, which he found confining, Jaspers insisted upon the importance of what he called “transcendence.”

卡尔·雅斯贝斯，其职业生涯从医学和精神病学到哲学，拥有大多数存在主义者缺乏的科学兴趣。但他坚持从克尔凯郭尔和尼采那里获得的存在主义者信念，即所有的基本思考都依赖于自我理解。尽管对宗教正统有怀疑，但他发现它受到了限制，雅斯贝斯坚持他所称的“超越”的重要性。

The next generation of thinkers brought existentialism conspicuously into the public arena. The most famous of them is Jean-Paul Sartre. In the French resistance during the Nazi era, Sartre acted out the basic existentialist belief in “engagement.” A series of short stories, novels (for example, Nausea), and plays (for example, No Exit) established Sartre’s influence in the arts. His major works of formal philosophy are Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason. The frequent preoccupation of Sartre’s fiction with sordid aspects of experience seemed to many critics an assault on the dignity of man. But Sartre replied that existentialism is “a humanism” and affirmed unequivocally the moral importance of human freedom. He is an avowed atheist, less because of objective metaphysical reasons than because he believes that man by his freedom, rather than by dependence on God, must establish morality and his own integrity. In 1964, in an act of existentialist independence, Sartre refused to accept the Nobel Prize for literature.

下一代思想者们将存在主义惹人注目地带入了公共领域。他们中最著名的是让-保罗·萨特。在纳粹时代，在法国抵抗运动中，萨特把基本的存在主义主义信仰付诸于“契约”之中。一系列短篇故事、小说（例如，《恶心》，和戏剧（例如《禁闭》）确立了萨特在艺术上的影响力。他形式哲学的主要著作是《存在与虚无》和《辩证理性批判》。萨特小说经常关注经验的肮脏方面，对许多评论家来说似乎是对人类尊严的侵犯。但萨特回应说，存在主义是“一种人文主义”，并明确肯定了人类自由的道德重要性。他是一个公开承认的无神认者，不是因为客观的形而上学原因，而是因为他相信，人通过他的自由而不是依赖上帝，一定会建立道德和他自己的正直。1964年，萨特以存在主义者的独立性，拒绝接受诺贝尔文学奖。

Albert Camus, a Nobel laureate, for a time was a close colleague of Sartre, then broke with him on both political and philosophical grounds. Camus’ early writings (a short novel, The Stranger, and an essay, The Myth of Sisyphus) were radically existentialist in their theme of human self-assertion against the absurdity of the universe. But in the novel The Plague and the essay The Rebel he showed the power of compassion, brotherhood, and enduring loyalties. Although Camus continued to stress the importance of freedom, he moved from radical existentialism to a tragic humanism.

阿贝尔·加缪，一位诺贝尔奖得主，一度曾是萨特的亲密同事，后来在政治和哲学立场上与他决裂。加缪的早期作品（短篇小说《局外人》，和随笔《西西弗斯神话》在反对宇宙的荒谬，人类自我肯定的主题方面都是激进的存在主义者。但在小说《鼠疫》和随笔《反抗者》中，他展示了同情、兄弟情以及持久忠诚的力量。尽管加缪频繁地强调自由的重要性，但他却从激进的存在主义转向了悲剧的人文主义。

Contemporary Significance.  In the latter half of the 20^th century, existentialism passed its faddist and sectarian stage and entered into the mainstream of philosophy. If few philosophers wished to be known as existentialists, most philosophers had taken up existentialist themes. Pragmatism had always had some kinship with existentialism—especially in William James insistence that truth is sought by volitional persons, not by abstract reason. John Dewey, although his emphasis on scientific method was sometimes hostile to existentialism, gave major attention to “the existential matrix of inquiry.” Phenomenology gave increasing emphasis to the same experiential phenomena that had given rise to existentialism. Thus one of the two major streams of 20^th century philosophy exhibited the interaction of existentialism with pragmatism and phenomenology.

当代的意义。在20世纪后半叶，存在主义经过其时尚和宗派阶段，进入了哲学主流。即使很少有哲学家希望被称为存在主义者，但大多数哲学家已经接受了存在主义的主题。实用主义一直与存在主义有某些共同特征—尤其是威廉·詹姆斯坚持认为，真理是由有意志的人探寻的，而不是抽象的理性。约翰·杜威，虽然他强调科学方法有时对存在主义是有敌意的，但他对“探寻的存在矩阵”给予了主要关注。现象学越来越强调产生了存在主义的相同的经验现象。因此，20世纪哲学的两个主流之一展示了存在主义与实用主义和现象学的相互作用。

The other major stream, analytic philosophy, increasingly turned from logical positivism to a sophisticated linguistic analysis, not alien to the later work of Heidegger. Existentialism, therefore, became less a distinctive philosophy and more a coloration in most philosophies. If its radical nonconformity was thereby jeopardized, some of its rebellious quality persisted in the beatniks and later the hippies, although usually with an anti-intellectualism not characteristic of its originating geniuses.

另一个主流，分析哲学逐渐从逻辑实证主义转向复杂的语言分析，与海德格尔后来的著作并不陌生。所以，存在主义不再是一种独特的哲学，而更像是大多数哲学中的一种色彩。如果这种激进的不一致因此受到损害，那么它的某些反叛特征在垮掉的一代和嬉皮士中依然坚持着，尽管通常带有一种并非是其最初天赋特征的反智主义。

Although existentialism may be religious or atheistic, its origin in Kierkegaard suggests that it influenced subsequent theology and philosophy of religion. Among the religious thinkers who explicitly acknowledge its impact have been Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann (Protestant), Gabriel Marcel (Roman Catholic), Nikolai Berdyaev (Eastern Orthodox), and  Martin Buber (Jewish). Characteristic of these varied thinkers is a religious personalism and a conviction that neither authority nor rational argument can take the place of commitment or “ultimate concern” (Tillich’s phrase) as a condition for religious understanding.

尽管存在主义可能是宗教的或是无神论的，但它起源于克尔凯郭尔，意味着它影响了后来的宗教神学和哲学。在明确承认其影响的宗教思想者中有保罗·田立克和鲁道夫·布尔特曼（新教徒），加布里埃尔·马塞尔（罗马天主教），尼古拉·别尔德耶夫（东正教），以及马丁·布伯（犹太教）。这些不同的思想者的特征是一种宗教的人格主义和信仰，即权威或理性的争论都不能代替承诺或“终极关怀”（田立克语）成为一种宗教理解的条件。

The existentialist impulse has EXPRESSED itself in various other human activities. Existentialist psychotherapy objects to those psychologies that analyze personality chiefly in terms of mechanistic or unconscious processes. It insists that human will and intentionality are fundamental for the understanding and healing of personality. In the social sciences, the sociology of knowledge, as Karl Mannheim pointed out, recognizes the “existential determination of knowledge” in that perceptions are conditioned by the situation and interests of perceivers. In the arts, the “theater of the absurd” is perhaps the most obvious EXPRESSION of specific existentialist themes. But wherever the visual or literary arts aspire not simply to beauty or imitation of nature but to illumination of human existence and freedom, they have existentialist import.

存在主义的冲动将自身表达在其它的各种人类活动中。存在主义的心理疗法反对那些主要从机械的或无意识过程中分析个性的心理学。它坚定认为，人类的意志和意向性是理解和治疗个性的基础。在社会学科中，就像卡尔·曼海姆指出的那样，由于认知是受感知者的处境和利益影响的，因此，知识社会学承认“知识的存在性决定”。在艺术中，“荒谬的剧场”也许是特定存在主义主题最明显的表达。但无论在哪里，视觉或文学艺术渴望的不是简单的美或模仿大自然，而是对人类存在和自由的启迪，它们具有存在主义的重要性。

See also ABSURD; FRANCE—LITERATURE; SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL.

也可参阅荒谬；法国—文学；让-保罗·萨特词条。

                                      ROGER L. SHINN

                          Union Theological Seminary, New York

                                       罗杰·L. 希恩

                                     联合神学院，纽约

                                    2023年2月18日译

（译者注：该词条位列《大美百科全书》1985年版，第10卷，第762页至763页）