I hope you will not be discouraged by my remarks; I concentrate on bits that could improve. It is a good work for an undergraduate, but it is not yet in the league of professional papers.
- A few general remarks.
The paper on the whole reads well, which is good. It is, however, a bit superficial compared to professional papers, but that is common for undergraduates; it would not be right to expect more.
Basing a paper on a comparison between two philosophies is common and can provide interesting results. However, your choice makes it difficult since you treat two philosophies comprised of various philosophers with divergent ideas. I don’t know much of taoism, but existentialism is hard to properly characterize. By taking snippets of Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard it doesn’t become clear whether any of those would accept all standpoints you ascribe to existentialism. You might want ot read David E. Cooper, Existentialism, who struggles with the same problem and solves it by creating his own amalgam, ‘The Existentialist’. A different approach would be to take only one existentialist philosopher (such as Sartre).
Furthermore the paper is a bit flat, because you do not do much more than point out similarities. That is good, but it becomes more interesting if you can provide some sort of conclusion. Do the similarities point to a mystic undercurrent? Are they accidental? Has Taoism provided a solution for a problem that exists in existentialism?
Or maybe you could point out that the different basis of these philosophies apparently still allows for similar ‘practical’ conclusions. The most interesting papers make something ‘happen’, a new insight or so, which often can come across by concentrating on a single example. That reminds me, the paper, which is somewhat abstract, might profit from providing an actual example to demonstrate things with.
The paper might benefit from concentrating more on a smaller part, such as the concept of authenticity, to which it is mostly dedicated anyway. If you could contrast only Sartrean authenticity to a taoist concept, it would be more manageable, and maybe provide a smaller but stronger point. This would still be quite a bit of work, though.
The literature you have used makes a dated impression. There is no need for an exhaustive search through the literature, but I would suggest books like T.C. Anderson, Sartre’s Two Ethics, and Peter Caws, Sartre, and Arthur C. Danto, Sartre. Anderson is clear and to the point, Caws and Danto are general introductions. You should also check the Cambridge Companion to Sartre, which has a more up to date bibliography.
- A few further comments that I thought of while reading.
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the introduction is somewhat unassuming. That may be because you have not provided a title, which would make clear why in your first sentence you are speaking about taoism and existentialism.
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“In hopes of…” sounds contrived.
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your second paragraph starts off repeating what you just said.
The anecdote/quote is fun but doesn’t seem to do much work for the ‘theme’.
“low character of existentialist thinkers”: what do you mean? Do you mean that they were bad people or that they are not considered to be top-notch thinkers?
Your next paragraph again repeats the point of the first paragraph. That is clumsy. A better way of writing would be not to mention the contrast in the beginning, but show it: first describe taoism by superficial characteristics as you do in par. 2, then list the main existentialists in par. 3, then say that it looks as if there is no common ground, and that you will show there is.
p. 5: “constant action endorsed by existentialists”. I would take issue with this statement. I do not interpret existentialists as doing this. They only emphasize that you cannot avoid responsibility; they recognize that men are generally and unavoidably not really aware, thinking, they live in the state of the ?one?. But that in itself is not bad.
p. 6: you mention authenticity as a force of the universe. That is not a correct representation. authenticity is a state of being, and what it involves is quite difficult to retrieve from the varied writings of various philosophers. While there may be an analogy, it looks as if taoism is based on an entirely different metaphysics/ontology (roughly speaking, theory of what the universe is).
p. 6: “Here, however, we see a contradiction”. It is not a proper contradiciton, as it is usually meant. It is only a contrast between two theories, not a contradiction within one theory.