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The ethical and religious stages correspond roughly to what Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers call, respectively, the inauthenticity and the authenticity of existence. Art is not as a rule recognized by contemporary Existentialists as an autonomous stage; it is almost always for them an essential manifestation of existence itself. For Jaspers, it is a mode of reading in nature, in history, and in men the cipher of transcendence; i.e., the negative symbol in which transcendence is revealed. According to Camus, it is an aspect of man's revolt against the world. The artist tries to remake the sketch of the world that is before him and to give it the style--that is to say, the coherence and unity--that it lacks. For this purpose, he selects the elements of the world and freely combines them in order to create a value that escapes man continuously but that the artist perceives and tries to salvage from the flux of history.
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Philosophical Movements
Censorship
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