The Idea of Existentialism

For the Frankfurt School of philosophers, struggling in the 1930's and 1940's to find alternatives to Marxism and capitalism, the great problem of society was 'alienation'. Economic rivalries and short-sighted materialism sundered society. Individuals felt dissatisfied and unrooted. Martin Heidegger proposed a strategy for coping: accepting our existence between birth and death as the only immutable thing about us and tackling life as a project of self-realisation, of 'becoming'. Who we are changes as a project unfolds. This 'existentialism' represented the retreat of intellectuals into the security of self-contemplation, in revulsion from an uglified world.