This chapter explores images of plant life in philosophy and literature with particular focus on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. It pursues the question of what we can learn about the nature of the human being and its place in the world from plants and the way they are rooted in earth. Over the past half-century, many voices identify our disconnection from the earth with the centrality of technological progress, capitalist production, industrialization, and globalization that are essential to our modern self-understanding and way of life. What was supposed to be the root of human distinction has ended up uprooting us. Is this because we have a distorted view of what it means to be rooted in the first place, and our dependency on the rootedness of plant life? This chapter interrogates the metaphor of the root in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous novel Nausea. Whereas Sartre considers the earth as an inert background in relation to human purposes: always there, meaningless, the earth is the static backdrop of our human drama, Nietzsche’s vegetal imaginary puts forward an idea of human life as deeply embedded in both earthly and planetary life.

1. This chapter explores hitherto unacknowledged influences, including McLuhan and Ong, on Dusklands. New light is shed on the novels manuscript origins and its relation to satire.

The third force movement, grounded in the principles of existential philosophy, focuses on the individual in quest of identity, values, and authenticity. The nineteenth century writings of such figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dilthey formed the background for the view of the person as alone and dehumanized. The twentieth century works of Sartre, Camus, and Jaspers offered further expression to the basic state of anxiety and absurdity. The personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Karol Wojtyła reintroduced the person within psychology. The methodological writings of Husserl and Heidegger contributed to the development of phenomenology as a means of investigating the holistic character of human experience. The combined existential–phenomenological psychology was an application of a new orientation in clinical settings, by such psychologists as Merleau-Ponty and Binswanger. In America, the humanistic viewpoints of Allport, Bühler, Maslow, May, and Rogers agreed generally with the European movement, and a center of existential-phenomenological psychology emerged at Duquesne University. Although it did not generate a comprehensive alternative to behaviorist formulations, the third force movement has exerted an impact on clinical applications, especially in therapeutic efforts.

Some find the theology of an eternal punishment to be morally repugnant and theologically without warrant. But even if such is true of traditional doctrines of Hell, typified by those of Aquinas, it is not implausible to read Inferno as an “anti-narrative,” among other reasons because the literatures that write of a truly infernal mentality – for example,that of Dr. Faustus in Marlowe’s play – are vastly significant and their significance would not be lost even were Hell as an eternal condition impossible. For an infernal will is psychologically possible, even if the Hell willed is impossible as an existent state of affairs.

The Introduction sets out the key claims of the book, and provides an outline of its chapters. These claims are that the French tradition rejects understanding thinking and judging, that this leads to an ambivalent relationship with Hegel and a return to Kant, and that the French tradition develops a novel account of thinking, and a new model of sense.

The third chapter explores Sartre’s account of thinking, focusing on his relatively neglected early work on the imagination. It takes up Sartre’s largely unacknowledged debt to Bergson, showing that despite Sartre’s move to phenomenology, his account of the difference between imagining and perceiving relies on Bergson’s logic of multiplicities. It argues that this influence carries on into Being and Nothingness where Sartre’s account of the situation as the process that makes judgement possible relies on a pre-juridical moment that inverts Bergson’s account of free will while remaining true to the categories underlying it. It analyses Sartre’s account of why we falsely understand consciousness as juridical, which reworks Kant’s own arguments in the paralogisms before showing how his account of consciousness ultimately fails to provide the positive account of the constitution of a situation that he requires.

Sartre’s play No Exit is described in order to demonstrate the nature of imprisonment that results from looking at oneself via the mirrors of social judgment. In a similar vein, the “male gaze” is analyzed as the imprisoning reduction of the female body as an it-position in the service of the pleasure of the male viewer. This is followed by a discourse about racial discrimination in which the powerful and discriminating other is not simply an “objective” reality outside the self but an organizing part of it. Furthermore, it is argued that positions are not always fixed but, under specific circumstances, flexible as exemplified by a series of psychological experiments investigating the so-called rubber hand illusion. The flexibility of positioning and repositioning is further explained by the story of James Griffin who changed his skin color from white to black. Finally, the dialogical self is described as inherently social, spatial, temporal, and historical.

While Manichaeism and Existentialism would seem to be two very different topics, they are intricately connected in Mailer’s work. Though as a young man Mailer maintained atheistic beliefs, his ideas shifted in the mid-1950s, and his evolving theory of existentialism became intricately tied to his developing spiritual ideology, which by the 1960s was shaping most of his writing. While he borrowed ideas from famed existential theorists like Kierkegaard and Sartre, Mailer formulated his own unique brand of existentialism, one that included the possibility of a God. The crux of existentialism in Mailer’s mind, as this chapter explains, was the ability to face down the unknown with courage, which in turn meant confronting the Manichaean idea that an imperfect God was constantly at war with the Devil.

Richard Wright’s second novel, The Outsider (1953) was conceived as an exploration of modernity and the human condition, specifically apart from the concerns of race. Wright described it as “the first literary effort of mine projected out of a heart preoccupied with no ideological burden save that of rendering an account of reality as it strikes my sensibilities and imagination.” He further explained that in his attempt to “render my sense of our contemporary living as I see it and feel it … My hero could have been of any race.” This approach led many contemporaneous critics to reject the book. Even more contemporary critics like John M. Reilly have cited Wright’s “extreme existentialism” as evidence of his frustration “with politics consequent to his observation of the opening events of the Cold War in Europe.” These unsettled responses suggest the importance of reconciling Wright’s commitment to racial justice with his philosophical concerns. Existentialism need not exist independent of race for as The Outsider suggests, blackness highlights unique conditions of Sartrean freedom and Kierkegaardian dread. Despite its mixed reception, The Outsider represents an important effort to unite existentialism with the experience of blackness.

This chapter shows that in French culture, starting with La Rochefoucauld and powerfully carried forward by Rousseau, the reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) was considered to be a fundamental threat to a sort of virtuous self-reliance on individual conscience. The chapter seeks to demonstrate that this “negative” meaning of recognition is still present in subsequent figures, including twentieth-century authors such as Sartre. On the key issue of whether recognition is primarily a threat to authority or an opportunity for mutual affirmation, it is often insufficiently appreciated that Sartre was closer to Rousseau than to Hegel. The chapter also attempts to identify some sociopolitical reasons that may explain why such a negative understanding might have been dominant in French culture.

Camus takes a Woolfian message of human limitation and solidarity – not domination and hierarchy – from his vision of nature and from his reading of Greek tragedy. Camus argues that modern European history “has put on the mask of destiny”; this history behaves as the divine or natural fatality that it claimed to supersede. Grounded in Camus’s writing on the Greeks and tragedy in his lectures, interviews, essays, and infamous dispute with Jean-Paul Sartre, this chapter explores Camus’s ethics of tragedy. Camus's ethical paradigm – cognizance of injurious power accompanied by lucid revolt – is on offer in The Plague, the lyrical short story “The Adulterous Wife,” and his unfinished novel The First Man. Finally, this chapter argues for Camus’s fierce indictment of genocidal politics in The Stranger and The Fall.