Dissertation

Existentialism Revisited : the Big Lie from Nietzsche to Lu Xun

Sun, Haozhan

2022

Overview

What commonality holds together all existentialists? Existentialism is notoriously difficult to define and there seems to be little agreement on how to use the term. At the same time, a cursory look at the content pages of the authoritative works on existentialism reveals that their authors discuss more or less the same list of thinkers. If this is so then it feels reasonable to assume that there is something tangible that holds the concept of existentialism together. This thesis aims to identify the commonality of existentialism by analysing the ideas of five existentialist writers-Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus-whose status as existentialist thinkers is rarely questioned in the relevant literature. This thesis is an interdisciplinary project that employs Deleuze's methodology of conceptual personae to facilitate a dialogue between literature and philosophy. Conceptual personae are idiosyncratic figures that help philosophers to enunciate complex ideas without resorting to reductive definitions. My thesis reads some of the key literary figures in writers' novels as conceptual personae, thereby achieving a methodological transition from textual analysis to conceptual analysis. By closely analysing these chosen conceptual personae, this thesis identifies a common paradigmatic structure that all the major works commonly agreed to be works of existentialism share. This structure consists of the following constituents: (i) a realisation of the existential lie; (ii) a movement towards a transitional state of reactive nihilism; (iii) a presentation of ultimate demands. The identification of the existentialist paradigm enriches our conceptual understanding of existentialism. Importantly, it gives us a tool to discover existentialist thinkers outside of the Western tradition. The last chapter employs this tool in the Chinese cultural context and helps identify the influential Chinese writer Lu Xun as an existentialist. This discovery will then turn out to have some exciting implications for our understanding of China's Cultural Revolution.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Existentialism