10 Best Existential Books That Will Make You Question Your Existence.
…because it is better to read one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Existentialism is a tradition of philosophical inquiry associated mainly with certain 19th and 20th-century European philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that life, existence, the universe, and everything in it have no inherent meaning or value, nothing imposed from beyond. So you are forced to create your own meaning. In the face of ultimate meaninglessness, you are completely free to define yourself and your actions.
Being raised in a society and culture where you are expected to know what you want to major in and where you want to be professional even before you are legally even an adult can naturally trigger questions of why this? why now? why me? what if I choose not to go by the rule book?.. As a part of this generation riddled with academic, professional, and social pressures and anxieties, it is absolutely safe to say that existential crises come at regular intervals of my life. Sometimes, the best way to work through this and question more about your existence is to read books in which characters are dealing with the same issue.
So here listed below are 10 best books to help you deal with your headspace issues.
1. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre is an author I don’t like very much. He’s also one of the few authors I almost always agree with, unfortunately. If that is not enough to cause some nausea, one can add a bit of existential anxiety and here we go: by hitting Sartre in the face with Camus’ idea of the absurdity of life, I have confirmed Sartre’s bleak outlook on humanity as well. If I had liked it, I would have solved the Catch 22 of life!
Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of a young writer, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times — existentialism. The book chronicles his struggle with the realisation that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning; a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. A seminal work of contemporary literary philosophy, nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live.
It could be a deeply unsettling read, and one of Sartre’s earliest and least-political works, as it was written before the Second World War. Also, it doesn’t really talk ideas, which is why it is really a different experience from most books, especially most philosophy related ones. It is the experiences and sensations themselves, broken down, sort of the ultimate pinnacle of the common “show, don’t tell” writing expression. So it requires a different sort of input from the reader, where instead of chewing on a bunch of intellectual things the author says, you are really experiencing the basis of his existentialism first-hand, where the structures of the world sort of deconstructing in front of you, and this can hit people in different ways.
2. The Stranger by Albert Camus
The novel’s original title in French is L’Etranger, some have translated it into “The Outsider” first, and then later the book had an alternative title “The Stranger”, translated by Matthew Ward in 1989. Even though the theme of alienation — being an outsider is one of the favorite themes in Camus’s works, in this particular novel, Camus doesn’t want to depict Meursault as “the stranger who lives outside of his society”, but as a man who is “the stranger within his society”.
In this book, the main character, Meursault, holds no real opinion about anything, and neither does anything (even the death of his own mother) effect him very much. Upon the death of his mother, from the first look it seems that he feels nothing, he isn’t disturbed by the fact that his mother is no longer exist; but from that moment the news hits him, he could not shake off the notion of not having a mother in this life. Repeatedly, he keeps mentioning his mother more often, in an unconscious way, the image of his mother has always been there, but he never expresses in any passionate way like crawling and crying at her funeral or asking unnecessary questions like “why people die”. He accepts all, as facts, whether it’s love or hatred, or death, or disgust, it makes no difference in his mind. The lack of description, motivation, and action causes Meursault to become something of a literary Rorschach test. The reader ends up filling this vacuum with their own prejudices and societal preconceptions, making the reader as involved in building the world as the author.
While reading this book, I felt great sympathy with the lost soul who is Camus’ main character. I think Mersault is the only sane man in an insane society. Everyone around him judges him for not acting the way they expect a person to act. But their assumptions about how a moral human should act are just fantasies based on ignorance, bias, and arrogance. No one really understands human nature, and Mersault finds himself accused of being immoral in a world that has no idea what human morality really is.
The Stranger probably isn’t what you would typically expect from most novels. The whole story is a deliberate exercise in absurdity, and while the plot is very simple, and the characters are seemingly one dimensional, it all works together to create great philosophical work. The Stranger peels like an onion, and the further between the lines you read, the more there is to find. There is an amazing amount of meaning and content packed into its 150 pages.
3. Notes From The Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Have you ever tried thinking of a really hard-to-grasp topic only to reach some kind of a barrier in your mind? It’s like, you can only reach a certain point of thought and if you try to think beyond that, your stream of thoughts either goes in the wrong direction or just completely vanishes. Well, somehow, Dostoyevsky is able to reach beyond the barrier and he’s even able to present it through this dark glimpse of life and suffering that is so relatable.
The narrator is a 40 year old man living in his basement and the whole novel seemed to revolve around the fact of the narrator justifying his actions by his being overly consciousness. A paranoid, misanthrope anti-hero with unreliable paradoxical thoughts, beliefs and actions. The book is divided into two parts.
The first part is a monologue about his thoughts on life, human being, happiness and harsh criticism of determinism and intellectualism. He’s lonely, and has no friends, but that’s only because he’s too intelligent and nobody would be able to understand him. He hates everybody, yet the one thing he wants is to feel loved and human. The second half is (as the narrator declares) a memory which he has to write down in order to get rid of. It’s about his 20s and his reunion with some old military friends which results in his encounter with a young prostitute. Whatever he says he believes in the first part, we see him betray in the second. You may think his beliefs are the result of the hell he’s lived in but you can never know. The only thing you’re sure of at the end of the book is that he’s not to be trusted and he’s surely living in the same hell as all of us.
The whole ending really left me feeling empty and really struck a chord with me. Because the narrator was really relatable in this instance. This book must rank as one of the most careful portraits of depression in world literature. The narrator starts off somewhere near the bottom of the heap and he stays there. If anything, he just pushes himself somewhat further down, rejecting any opportunity to pull himself up even going out of his way to avoid even noticing any such opportunities. He’s completely consumed by himself.
4. Being And Time by Martin Heidegger
It took me months to read this book from start to finish and sometimes forced me to re-read pages because language takes quite a bit of getting used to. A third of the way through it became very enjoyable to read because I began to grasp what Heidegger’s project was. Some of his more fascinating concepts were the entangled thrownness of Da-Sein (human existence) and his explorations of the philosophy of history. So, if you are eyeing this book, be prepared to read pages 3–10 times to make sure you understand the nuances of how the words are used by the author. You have to work hard to learn Heidegger’s language, but once you get the hang of it, you can follow this masterpiece.
This book sums up everything it is about in the title, Being and Time. Being is dissected and torn apart and put back together again as it relates to Time. This is due to the fact that all Beings are Temporal. That is to say that all Beings exist in Time so as such they can not be separated from Time for then they would cease to Be. There is a tension in the book, it seems to me, between seeing the world primordially, without the encrustations that have accrued from the Greek way of seeing things, and interpreting the world. Heidegger appears to do both.
While highly critical of Heidegger for his political activities, the philosopher Karl Jaspers said of him: “In the full flow of his discourse he occasionally succeeds in hitting the nerve of the philosophical enterprise in a most mysterious and marvellous way. In this, as far as I can see, he is perhaps unique among contemporary German philosophers.” “Being and Time” is important that you can not miss.
5. Denial Of Death by Ernest Becker
The introduction of this book caught my instant interest with formulations about how the connection of the brain and body creates a constant problem for the human being. The brain is able to imagine the infinite, to travel through the solar system, and create abstract models over how the planets will move eons from now. This at the same time as we have to carry around this stinking meatbag of a body on which we can’t even control simple valves where brown matter resides from.
Becker makes clear that man is in a constant state of anxiety and provides a simple why we want to fit in to society, but at the same time we have a desire of individualization, self importance. These two things are at odds with each other, and, are nothing but masks to distract us from the terror of death that lurks around the corner. From here, mankind has made death it’s single most important motivator in life. To make one feel eternal, to make one transcend itself and become part of a greater whole. Decker makes sense out of the limitations of existence and the way we must discover our lives within the boundary of our death.
That’s being said, this book is not a garden of diamonds at all. It has its boring parts, parts that don’t make sense, outdated explanations, and far-fetched interpretations. It’s psychoanalysis after all. The section on sexual perversions is a case in point; his points missed the mark by such a long shot, even though I loved all the things he said before, I almost put down the book for good. It was unbearable. Despite all that, I would still recommend this to anyone who likes to think about life and death. It’s a must-have.
6. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
I always believe the trick to understanding Kafka is understanding Kafka himself.
This book deals with isolation and cruelty within the family. This is a sad and absurd tale about a man who wakes one morning to discover that he had transformed into a giant insect. At first, his elderly parents and teen-aged sister are appalled and frightened by his appearance. He tries his best to stay out of their way but no one realizes that he can still understand language and wants to remain part of the family rather than be locked away in his room — out of sight, out of mind. Before turning into insect, Gregor has spent years working to pay off his family’s debts but when he finds himself as a monstrous… beetle? Cockroach? Something undesirable anyway, see how his family treat him.
I tried googling what this story meant, but it seems there is no definitive answer. My feeling is that Gregor was suffering from some kind of depression, and who would blame him when his entire family is a bunch of arseholes who only care for him when he’s capable of earning money to pay off their debts. Whether he is a true insect or not, the family deems it appropriate to shut him away in a room and treat him like scum. It shows how we can change when something doesn’t meet our expectations or benefits us anymore.
7. Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard
This book is one of those philosophical work that might actually change you. Works of philosophy should either make you look at the world differently or yourself differently. Either/Or is in the latter class. Compared to the other Kierkegaard works I have read, this book is much more dense and heavy reading.
This book is an engaging work of duality expounding on two different sets of ethos from two fictional characters. The first, called 'A', is a young aesthete whom in a search for a meaningful existence explores the ideas of music, art, and most obsessively, a young woman. The character of 'A' can be profoundly optimistic and exuberant, but also dismally pessimistic.
The second half of the book comes from the point of view of ‘Judge Wilhem’, an elderly man who makes the case for the validity of marriage to the young man ‘A’ through a series of letters. Judge Wilhelm is an ethicist and believes that virtue and dedication to living morally brings about it’s own aesthetic excellence.
Throughout this book, Kierkegaard makes constant reference to Greek, Roman, French, German, and Danish axioms, which can be fun to read the footnotes on.
'...the highest form of enjoyment conceivable is to be loved, loved more than everything in the world. To poeticize oneself into a girl is an art, to poeticize oneself out of her a masterpiece.'
'Yesterday I loved. Today I suffer. Tomorrow I die.'
8. The Trial by Franz Kafka
The story of The Trial started with a narration: “Somebody must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”
With his groundless and ambiguous arrest, Josef K. quickly finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law and the justice system. We never know his crime, and neither does he. When he asks at the station, the officers say, “We don’t answer questions like that.” What is a man to do but surrender to his fate?
This book is surely intriguing and thought-provoking. With the recent events happening in the world, this book literally sent chills down my spine. It is well-settled that the law’s primary function is to maintain public order. This will prevent our society from being archaic, but what if the law itself, or lawmakers themselves enact laws that push our society to chaos? How would archaic laws affect modern society? Generally, we felt safer with laws, but I quote Josef K- “What sort of men were they? What were they talking about? What office did they represent? After all, K. lived in a state governed by law, there was universal peace, all statues were in force; who dared assault him in his own lodgings?”
9. The Plague by Albert Camus
This book can be read in so many ways, as simply a story of disease and the reactions of those it affects or as a metaphor for evil and man’s inability to eradicate it no matter how hard they try. You may call it a novel of the plague, or a war novel, or a novel of death or the novel of pain and suffering. I Call it Camus’s cry for help during his country’s dismal times.
The Plague was originally written as a metaphor for the Nazis’ occupation of France, but it has been reconsidered by every subsequent generation to represent its own existential threat. What is your existential threat Loneliness? The environment? Income inequality? What do you do with your life when you have only a limited time left to live and no hope? Do you just kill yourself? Or do you keep on living? Do you create meaning in everyday actions, even though you know you’re doomed? How do you deal with the meaninglessness of the rest of your life when you know it is ending soon?
I see the plague as a symbol of the inevitability of human suffering, crisis, sickness, torture, death that can come up at any moment, at any time. That is the existential vulnerability that we as humans have to live with, thought out all ages.
The story is set in Oran, a city in Algeria that experiences a breakout of the Bubonic plague, and is soon placed under quarantine. The story is narrated by an eyewitness account of a plague which starts with one dead rat and then spreads like wildfire. Camus tells the story around several eccentric characters and how they behave. Dr Rieux struggles to cope with the increasing death toll, Tarrou who has seen everything, the journalist, Rambert both join voluntary health teams to assist. The civil servant, Grand stops his obsessive writing for the public good. They experience all manners of emotions from hysteria, despondency, avarice, uncertainty,self-reflection and fear. There is of course a villain with Cottard a black marketer making money from people’s misery. However, it is not all doom and gloom.
I liked the structure of the book. The story was told by an anonymous narrator, who promised to reveal himself at the end of the book.
10. Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl
Victor Frankl has been survived when he was thrown into a network of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps that occurred in many German Jews in Eastern Europe in the 1930s.
This is definitely one of the most powerful books you could ever read that can change your viewpoint on life.
This book details the experiences the author endured in the Nazi concentration camps. Here he learns the value of his studies into what he coined ‘Logotherapy.’ Logotherapy is the pursuit for the meaning of one’s life. While brought to the brink of despair within these camps, Viktor Frankl keeps his spirit and those around him strong through this concept. His family were sadly killed in the concentration camps, but he still published his works and carried on. He faced the burden of his trauma and decided his will to live remained.
My biggest takeaway from this book is that you cannot change circumstances of pain, but you can change how much suffering you allow yourself to endure. Pain is inevitable but you can change your mindset on how much suffering is born from it.
If you ever are feeling down, or need a reality check into life, check out this book. It will, at its worst, minimize your complaints, and at its best, make you grateful for what you have.
