Existentialism and the Long Arc: Identity, Commitment, and Authentic Living Over Time

Existentialism's great early works were written by philosophers in their thirties and forties facing the crises of occupied France, post-war reconstruction, and the collapse of inherited certainties. What do their insights look like when applied not to a moment of acute crisis but to the long, accumulative business of building an identity, sustaining commitments, facing aging, and living with the choices you have made and cannot undo? This course takes existentialist ideas into the temporal depth of a life lived across decades. By the end of this course you will be able to apply existentialist concepts of freedom, authenticity, and responsibility to the challenges of sustained adult commitment, analyze the existentialist dimensions of midlife, aging, and mortality in a philosophically rigorous way, engage critically with the feminist critique of existentialism's treatment of embodiment and relational life, and articulate a personally coherent account of how to live authentically over time. What you will learn: - The problem of commitment under radical freedom: how Sartrean freedom relates to long-term fidelity - Bad faith in long-duration form: how self-deception accumulates and compounds over years - De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity: freedom, oppression, and the obligation to others' freedom - Heidegger's being-toward-death applied to midlife and aging: authenticity as a temporal project - Regret and retrospective meaning: can we make sense of lives we could not fully control? - Merleau-Ponty on embodiment: the existentialist recovery of the body as site of lived experience - Iris Murdoch's critique: attention, love, and the limits of the Sartrean self as corrective - Narrative identity: Paul Ricoeur and the existentialist tradition in conversation The course draws on primary philosophical texts, literary works (including de Beauvoir's memoir and Camus's notebooks), and contemporary philosophical readings in narrative identity and existentialist ethics. Units alternate between philosophical analysis and extended reflection prompts designed to engage the material at the level of your own life and commitments. A final unit provides a structured template for writing a sustained philosophical reflection on a significant choice or commitment in your own life, evaluated against the existentialist concepts studied throughout the course. This course is designed for adults who have a working familiarity with existentialist philosophy and want to bring it into sustained contact with the actual texture of their lives and choices. It is suitable for those who have completed an introductory existentialism course or have equivalent background from independent reading. Prior exposure to the major existentialist thinkers is assumed.