Existentialism
Existence precedes essence. Sartre's formula in 1945 named what Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had been circling for a century — that a human being is a freedom that has to define itself, in moods that arise when there is no script: anxiety, dread, the absurd. The tradition that gathers under existentialism took shape in the twentieth century, in response to the collapse of inherited meaning.
What Existentialism Is
A philosophy of the concrete individual, the unchosen situation, and the choice that must be made anyway.
Existentialism is a twentieth-century philosophical movement with nineteenth-century roots in Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Its central claim is that a human being is not a fixed nature waiting to be expressed but a freedom that has to define itself through its own choices. Sartre gave the formula in his 1945 lecture, published 1946 as "Existentialism Is a Humanism" — existence precedes essence. There is no human blueprint to live up to; the blueprint is drawn in the act of living. From that starting point follow the themes the tradition is known for: radical freedom, responsibility without alibi, authenticity as a task, bad faith as the constant temptation, and anxiety as the structural mood of a being that knows it could be otherwise.
The label itself was retroactive. Kierkegaard never used the word; Sartre took up the name in 1945 and made it a public movement. Heidegger refused it, insisting his work was a fundamental ontology of being. Camus rejected it as well, distancing himself from Sartre after the 1952 break over "The Rebel." What unites the figures grouped under the label is less a doctrine than a stance: begin from the concrete existing individual, take seriously the situation in which a self finds itself thrown, refuse to dissolve the lived "I" into a system. The tradition runs along three strands: religious existentialists — Kierkegaard, Marcel, Buber, Tillich, Jaspers — for whom the leap is toward God; atheist existentialists — Sartre, Beauvoir — for whom the leap is into freedom alone; and a third position, Camus most prominently, that refuses both leaps and chooses to live the absurd consciously.
Core Principles
The four claims that frame the existentialist understanding of the human being.
Existence Precedes Essence
For a paper knife, the maker has the design first and the knife is made to fit. Sartre's claim is that for the human being there is no such prior design. We exist first; what we are is decided by what we do. The formulation appears in "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (1946), but the idea runs back through Heidegger to Kierkegaard. The consequence: no human nature to appeal to as an excuse.
Radical Freedom and Responsibility
The freedom existentialism describes is an ontological condition, not political liberty. We cannot not choose, and even refusing to choose is a choice. With that comes responsibility without exit: I am the author of my actions and bear the weight of what I have made of myself. Sartre's phrase — that we are "condemned to be free" — names a burden, not a celebration.
Authenticity and Bad Faith
Bad faith — mauvaise foi in Sartre — is the self-deception by which we pretend our freedom away. The waiter who plays his role so completely he forgets he chose it. The lover who treats her own desires as facts to be discovered. Authenticity is the harder act of owning one's freedom and one's situation without pretending either is something else.
Anxiety, Dread, and the Absurd
Kierkegaard's angst, Heidegger's Angst, Sartre's angoisse, Camus's absurde — different words, related disclosures. Anxiety is not pathology in this tradition but a structural mood that reveals the self's freedom and finitude. The absurd is what arises when a human longing for meaning meets a world that returns no answer.
From Thrownness to Choice
Existentialism does not prescribe a sequence. The stations below trace the movement that recurs across its major figures — from the disclosure of one's situation to the work of sustaining authenticity in it.
Confronting Finitude
Heidegger's being-toward-death — recognition that one's existence is bounded and that the boundary cannot be delegated. The disclosure is clarifying, not morbid: this life, this self, no infinite postponement.
Encountering the Absurd
Camus describes the moment in which the borrowed scaffolding gives way and the world no longer answers. The absurd is the gap between the demand for meaning and the silence that meets it. The encounter is the beginning of the path, not its end.
The Leap
Kierkegaard's leap of faith and Sartre's leap into freedom share a shape: at a certain point reasoning runs out and a stance must be taken. For Kierkegaard the leap is toward God; for Sartre into the responsibility of one's own freedom; for Camus the refusal of both leaps and the decision to live the absurd consciously.
Choosing Without Alibi
To choose without alibi is to act without appealing to nature, role, society, or unconscious as the real chooser. I take a stance, and I cannot pretend the stance was forced.
Taking Responsibility
Responsibility extends past the immediate act. In choosing for oneself, Sartre argues, one chooses an image of the human. Beauvoir extends this into ethics: my freedom is bound up with the freedom of others.
Creating Meaning
Meaning is not found waiting but made through engagement — writing, work, love, action, art. Camus closes "The Myth of Sisyphus" with the image of Sisyphus pushing his stone and the suggestion that one must imagine him happy. The making is the meaning.
Sustaining Authenticity
Authenticity is not achieved once. Bad faith is the steady gravity, and the work of seeing oneself clearly has to be done again. As Beauvoir put it in "The Ethics of Ambiguity," it is the taking up of one's freedom in each new situation.
Existentialist Practices
The tradition prescribes few formal exercises. These three crystallize what it asks of a life.
Confronting Mortality
The memento mori is older than existentialism, but Heidegger gave it philosophical weight. To live as a being-toward-death is not to dwell on dying but to allow the fact of one's end to clarify what the present is for. The practice is to let the boundary be felt rather than evaded — and to let that feeling re-order the day.
Examining Bad Faith
The Sartrean question, asked without flinching: where am I lying about not being free. Where am I treating a stance as a fact, a choice as a fate, a desire as something done to me. The practice is interior and unflattering. Most of the lies the self tells the self are about exactly this — that there was no other way.
Creative Engagement
Writing, art, action, work, love — for the existentialists, these are the answer to the absurd, not therapies for it. Camus wrote novels; Sartre wrote plays and political essays; Beauvoir wrote ethics and the largest critique of women's situation the century produced. The reply to a silent world is to make something in it.
Key Figures
Six figures across roughly a century and a half — from the Danish father of the tradition to the post-war French center and the psychiatric line that followed.
Søren Kierkegaard
1813 — 1855
The Danish father of the tradition, though he never used the word existentialism. Wrote under a series of pseudonyms — Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Johannes de Silentio — each a different existential standpoint. "Fear and Trembling," "The Concept of Anxiety," and "The Sickness Unto Death" mapped despair, dread, and the leap of faith.
Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 — 1900
A proto-existentialist rather than a member of the school. The death of God, the will to power, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and amor fati prepared the ground the twentieth-century existentialists would build on. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and "On the Genealogy of Morality" are his central books. Heidegger and Sartre both read him closely.
Martin Heidegger
1889 — 1976
"Being and Time" (1927) reset the philosophical conversation in the German tradition. Dasein, thrownness, the they-self, being-toward-death, and authenticity as Eigentlichkeit are all his terms. Heidegger refused the existentialist label and corrected Sartre publicly in the "Letter on Humanism." His Nazi Party membership (1933 — 1945), rectorship at Freiburg in 1933 — 34, and post-war teaching ban remain a permanent shadow over the work.
Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 — 1980
The figure who made existentialism a public movement. "Being and Nothingness" (1943) is the systematic work; "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (1946) is the popular distillation. Bad faith, the for-itself and in-itself, the look, and condemnation to freedom enter the lexicon here. Also a novelist ("Nausea," 1938) and playwright ("No Exit," 1944).
Simone de Beauvoir
1908 — 1986
Philosopher, novelist, and the figure who turned existentialism into a working ethics. "The Ethics of Ambiguity" (1947) confronts what Sartre's ontology left open — what to do with freedom once acknowledged. "The Second Sex" (1949) is the founding text of modern feminist philosophy.
Albert Camus
1913 — 1960
Algerian-French novelist and essayist who rejected the existentialist label. "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942) sets out the absurd; "The Stranger" (1942) dramatizes it; "The Rebel" (1951) extends the analysis to revolt. The 1952 break with Sartre, over Francis Jeanson's review of "The Rebel" in Les Temps modernes, closed the post-war Paris circle.
Phases of the Tradition
The movement's centers shifted across a century and a half — Copenhagen and Basel, Freiburg and Heidelberg, post-war Paris, the consulting room.
Nineteenth-Century Origins
Kierkegaard in Copenhagen, Dostoevsky in St. Petersburg, Nietzsche in Basel and Sils Maria. None used the word existentialism. Each set the central problems: the despairing self, the underground man, the death of God, the leap, the courage of new values.
Early German Existential Philosophy
Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927) and Karl Jaspers's three-volume "Philosophy" (1932) form the German axis. Heidegger's existential analytic of Dasein and Jaspers's Existenzphilosophie of limit-situations — death, suffering, struggle, guilt — define the German contribution before the war scattered it.
French Existentialism
Post-war Paris — Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty around Les Temps modernes. The Café de Flore moment when a philosophical movement was also a cultural one. Existentialism here is publicly engaged, leftward-leaning, and tied to questions of resistance, occupation, colonialism, and the meaning of action in history.
Christian Existentialism
Kierkegaard's heirs in the religious line — Gabriel Marcel in France, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr in the Protestant tradition, Martin Buber's "I and Thou" in the Jewish. The leap is toward God; the categories — encounter, presence, faith, dread before the holy — are reworked for the modern situation.
Existential Psychotherapy
Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, born in part in the camps and set out in "Man's Search for Meaning" (1946). Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, R. D. Laing, Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, and Emmy van Deurzen turn the philosophy into a clinical practice oriented around death, freedom, isolation, and meaning as the four ultimate concerns.
Phenomenology and Post-War Literature
The phenomenological line was always alongside, not after. Heidegger's "Being and Time" is a phenomenological work; Sartre subtitled "Being and Nothingness" "An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology"; Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty are themselves phenomenologists. Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" (1945) drew the embodied-subject thread out into its own register. The literary inheritance runs in parallel — Beckett, Kafka read backward as existentialist, the absurdist theatre, Walker Percy and Saul Bellow in America. The categories diffuse past philosophy into the general modern self-understanding.
Across Traditions
Existentialism's preoccupations — finitude, freedom, the courage to be a self — meet older traditions on shared ground. The connections are convergences, not borrowings.