system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is existentialism frowned upon?

Would it be considered a philosophy? If so its the only sect of philosophy I see people make fun of. I find it interesting personally.
gpt
Within the Continental tradition, existentialism has not faired well since the rise of structuralism and its heirs. Part of this is due to the anti-humanism that came with structuralism.

Existentialism is a humanism, in Sartre's phrase. It concerns human actors who are more-or-less transparent to themselves: they evaluate their situations, they make choices, they bear responsibility for those choices. The anti-humanist tendencies of structuralism is best summed in Levi-Strauss' criticism of existentialism as a "shopgirl metaphysics" (from *Tristes Tropiques*). What he meant (by that quaintly sexist dismissal) is that he distrusted any philosophy that elevated personal experience to the level of a philosophy. His emphasis on structures entailed that actors where never in control of their own choices--they were driven by structural forces beyond their control and cognizance, whether those be macrostructures (like kinship systems) or microstructures (like the unconscious). As time went by, this tendency to divorce people from their motivations got stronger as Foucault showed that the subject is an effect of power, Lacan showed that the unconscious is structured like a language, Derrida showed that any identity is founded upon the denial of its opposites, thereby requiring those opposites, etc. Methodologically, these thinkers share what Paul Ricoeur had called the "hermeneutics of suspicion." That is, a way of studying objects that took it for granted that what was on the surface was not the essential aspect of the object; something deeper needed to be ferreted out.

Basically, to structuralists and post-structuralists, existentialism seemed naive because it thought it could describe experience; rather, because it thought that described experience *mattered*. A similar critique was leveled against other phenomenologists, too. Sartre was the particular target of all of these criticisms. Derrida went so far as to say Sartre had basically no influence on his thought, which is a hard pill to swallow considering the enormous influence Sartre exercised on French philosophy for several decades. Other factors colluded in Sartre's falling out of favor: his politics were troublesome to many, he said some things about female genitalia that are bizarre and sexist in *Being and Nothingness*, he was probably a victim of his own enormous fame, etc.

All of this said, it does seem like there is something of a revival of existentialism happening now. People are starting to remember that Beauvoir was, in fact, an existentialist and a feminist and that the two are intimately linked. The anti-humanism of structuralism and post-structuralism is starting to look worn out, and an interest in choosing and willing is coming back (we can see this most clearly in Badiou's rise to prominence after the death of Derrida).