1062 TWENTIETH-CENTURYPHILOSOPHY
and phenomena that Phenomenologists have sought to describe are highly varied,
including, for instance, time consciousness; mathematics and logic; perception;
experience of the social world; our experience of our own bodies; and moral, aes-
thetic, and religious experience.
Existentialism, unlike Phenomenology, is not primarily a philosophical
method. Neither is it exactly a set of doctrines (at least not any oneset) but more
an outlook or attitude supported by diverse doctrines centered on certain common
themes. These themes include the human condition, or the relation of the individ-
ual to the world; the human response to that condition (described often in strongly
affective and preponderantly negative terms such as “despair,” “dread,” “anxiety,”
“guilt,” “bad faith,” “nausea”); being, especially the difference between the being
of persons (which is “existence”) and the being of other kinds of things; human
freedom; the significance (and unavoidability) of choice and decision in the
absence of certainty; and the concreteness and subjectivity of life as lived, over
against abstractions and false objectifications.
Existentialism is often thought to be antireligious (and is, in some of its versions),
but there has in fact been a strong current of Christian Existentialism, beginning with
the figure often credited with originating Existentialism, the nineteenth-century
Danish philosopher Kierkegaard. Existentialism’s relationship to Phenomenology is
a matter of some controversy, but at least one can say that many of the later
Existentialist thinkers, Sartre among them, have employed Phenomenological
methods to arrive at or support their specific variations on Existential themes.
Although Existentialism has been on the wane since the 1960s, it has enjoyed excep-
tional prominence, even popularity, for a philosophical movement, in part because of
its literary expressions by writers such as Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Marcel.
Structuralism is an interdisciplinary movement united by the principle that
social and cultural phenomena, including belief systems and every kind of dis-
course (literary, political, scientific, etc.), are best understood by analogy with
language, itself best understood as a structure of relations among its component
parts. Just as in language the crucial determinant of meaning (according to the
early structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure) is neither individual words nor
their reference to things outside language but their interrelationships within the
linguistic structure, so the crucial element in all social and cultural phenomena is
the underlying structure that determines the functions of the various parts. A good
deal of Structuralist analysis has been concerned with a kind of unmasking, that
is, with revealing political, social, or psychological phenomena as (allegedly) not
what they seem or what participants believe them to be but as determined by
structures often concealed from view.
This unmasking impulse persists with the group of thinkers sometimes
designated Post-Structuralists, who both rejected certain presuppositions of
Structuralism and added their own more radical ideas about the fundamental role
of language in constructing all human perceptions and conceptions of reality.
A particular form of this unmasking tendency is Deconstruction, introduced in the
work of Jacques Derrida, who is generally counted among Post-Structuralists.
Any attempt to define Deconstruction must labor in the shadow of Derrida’s
apparent rejection in advance of all such attempts. Nonetheless, it has seemed fair
to many interpreters to characterize it as a form of textual criticism or interpreta-
tion whose aim is to unmask and overcome hidden “privileging” that occurs in
texts of all kinds. This privileging, for example the privileging of reason, the
