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Sartre’s words depict a world in which the rational order is in question, where human beings are capable of the unspeakable and incomprehensible.
In a book that is often credited with introducing existentialism to American readers, Irrational Man, William Barrett explains that existentialism begins with “The Encounter with Nothingness,” and he devotes a subchapter to this topic (see ch. 2). The abyss was expressed by Albert Camus as the unbridgeable gulf between man’s desire for metaphysical assurance and his inability to find that assurance with his religious beliefs and philosophical systems. The absurd, as Camus described the phenomenon in The Myth of Sisyphus, “is born of this confrontation between this human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” (28). In Camus’ account, and those offered by most European versions of existentialism, the absurd confrontation assumes cosmic proportions, as the universe itself is the source of human frustrations. Barrett places the conflict at a more terrestrial level and identifies the decline of religion, the rational ordering of society, and the rise of science and the idea of finitude as the developments contributing to this encounter with nothingness. Stripped of the certainty provided by religious beliefs, humans are left with nothing, abandoned and forlorn, without meaning or purpose, in a world indifferent to human endeavor. The rational ordering of society replaces the paternal Christian God with the bureaucratic state, and authority becomes less predictable and accessible.
Certainly the encounter with nothingness is not limited to postwar Europeans. Each culture defines and expresses its own existential engagement, just as the Europeans did theirs. The existential outlook is not the exclusively property of any culture; therefore, I will employ a generic definition of existentialism.