Existentialism and Evolvementalism

In common parlance, 'Existentialist' usually has connotations of 'meaninglessness' and despairing', which are misleading indicators of what the Philosophical version of the term refers to. 'Existentialism' typically describes a group of Philosophers, most prominently Nietzsche, Kierkergaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre, whose affiliation seems so loose that a common Principle is difficult to discern. Indeed, Heidegger and Sartre are more overtly bound by their allegiances to Husserlian Phenomenological methodology. But, even though there is no single Principle that they all explicitly espouse, one that has been used to characterize their works is 'Existence precedes Essence'. In the terminology of these pages, 'Existence' is 'Individuality', and 'Essence' is 'Particularity', so that what each of the Existentialists presents is a theory of the internal structure of Individuality, which contrasts with the traditional definition of a Person as a Particular of a given sort, e. g. 'Rational Animal'. The alleged 'meaninglessness' of Existentialism is telling in its partial accuracy--that Existence has no pre-given Meaning frees Individuals to create it, and what 'despair' attaches to is the failure to grasp the liberating possibility involved. Evolvementalism disputes that Existence 'precedes' Essence, since it holds that Particularity is developmentally anterior to Individuality. It also appreciates the later work of Sartre, which methodically demonstrates, contrary to conventional American 'wisdom', that not merely are Individuality and Socialism not antithetical to one another, but that the latter, not Capitalism, is the collective organization that best accommodates the former. Amongst the Existentialists, Sartre best supports the Evolvemental thesis that Individuality entails involvement in a collective.