On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Abstract

Reviewed by: On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei George Pattison (bio) Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life. Oxford UP, 2021. 320 pages. As Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei observes, the last few years have seen a significant resurgence of interest in existentialism, both in and beyond the academy. Authors and texts who were dismissed during the time when postmodernism was the rallying-cry of the progressive academy are being rediscovered and re-applied in a wide variety of ways. It almost goes without saying, however, that if a renewed existentialism is to become a significant contributor to the ongoing conversation that is philosophy, it will not and cannot be exactly the same as the old existentialism. Indeed, the flyleaf refers to the book as offering “a new vision of existentialism,” a claim that is, I think, fully justified by the contents. Gosetti-Ferencei’s version of existentialism shows a deep and extensive immersion in the relevant classic texts, but it also brings these into dialogue with our contemporary concerns while interpreting and applying them with a generosity and kindness that was notably absent from [End Page 1057] at least some of its original representatives, though not all (there’s not much kindness in Sartre, for example). An opening chapter establishes what will become a theme throughout the study: that whilst the “existentialist café” of 1940s Paris rightly plays a crucial part in the formation of existentialism, there is much more to existentialism than the cigarettes, roll-neck jumpers, and sexually adventurous lifestyles of the Left Bank intelligentsia. We are warned that existentialism is a diverse and difficult philosophy and that it would be a mistake to reduce it to one or other catchphrase. Indeed, in Part II, Gosetti-Ferencei takes us through the intellectual genealogy of existentialism, from ancient philosophy, through romanticism, and on into the twentieth century, a story that strongly supports the claim that existentialism was not just a momentary philosophical fad. Startling as its rhetoric and style were to many post-war Anglophone readers, its fundamental questions and concerns were deeply and extensively rooted in the history of Western philosophy, all the way back through Descartes’ “turn to the subject” and the Stoics’ culture of self-formation to Parmenides’ meditations on being. Due attention is given to existentialism’s immediate nineteenth-century predecessors (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche) and to the complex interrelationship between existentialist philosophy in the narrow sense and cultural forms such as literature and jazz that became closely associated with it. This not only brings in Kafka and Rilke but also persuasively argues for the creative role of African-American writers and musicians such as Miles Davis in shaping existentialism and, importantly, not merely adapting it to their specific intellectual, personal, and cultural needs. Franz Fanon is, of course, also represented as a significant existentialist voice in his own right. This inclusion should not surprise us, since the experience of affirming black identity in a world shaped by hegemonic white voices resonates powerfully with the existentialist theme of a chronic mismatch between the individual’s self-experience and the demands of the social environment. Having prepared the ground for an examination of the core themes of existentialism, a third section examines these thematically under the headings “The Self,” “Others,” “World,” “Earth,” and “Being.” As can already be inferred from these topics, Gosetti-Ferencei does not simply accept Sartre’s view that the subject’s relationship to the non-human world is a relationship of mutual exclusion but goes some distance with Heidegger in affirming our relation to the earth as a proper medium in which to develop an authentic relation to being. Sartre’s aversion is, of course, well known from the novel Nausea, referred to (and rightly) at several moments in the book, but we also learn that it went to such an extreme that he only liked fruit when it had been processed, as in jam. A final section offers ten short essays on how existentialism might be applied to, e.g., seeking authenticity and avoiding the lure of role models (even existentialist role models), how to take and...