Existentialism

Introduction

Existentialism is the philosophy that turned the traditional question on its head: instead of asking what is the nature of the human being?, it asked what is it like to be a human being, and what do we make of the fact that there is no answer to the first question? The result is a tradition obsessed with freedom, anxiety, authenticity, and the terror of having to choose without grounds.

Founding moment

Existentialism as a self-conscious movement is a 20th-century French phenomenon, but it has a 19th-century origin in Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), the Danish religious thinker who insisted that abstract systems (especially Hegel's) miss the irreducible particularity of being an existing individual facing a decision. Kierkegaard wrote about anxiety, despair, faith, and the leap — the moment of commitment that no reasoning can justify.

The movement crystallized in mid-20th-century France with Jean-Paul Sartre's 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, which gave the movement its name and its most quotable formulation: existence precedes essence. The post-war atmosphere — the collapse of certainties, the experience of occupation and resistance, the absence of God — made existentialism the dominant intellectual mood of its decade.

Core doctrines

Existentialism is more a set of preoccupations than a doctrinal system. The shared themes:

1. Existence precedes essence. There is no human nature that determines what we are. We exist first and then make ourselves through our choices. This is true (Sartre argues) of nothing else; a knife is what it is because it was made for cutting. Humans alone exist before being defined.
2. Radical freedom. Because we have no fixed nature, we are radically free — condemned to be free, in Sartre's phrase. Every action is a choice, even refusing to act.
3. Anxiety as the basic mood. The recognition of one's own freedom produces anxiety (Angst) — not fear of something specific, but a more fundamental vertigo at the open horizon of choice.
4. Bad faith and authenticity. Bad faith is the attempt to evade the anxiety of freedom by pretending to be what one is not — a fixed identity, a determined role, an object among objects. Authenticity is the difficult acceptance of one's freedom and its responsibility.
5. Death and finitude. Heidegger especially emphasized that human existence is being-toward-death; the awareness of one's own coming death is what gives life its weight and shape.
6. Encounters with the other. Sartre's analysis of the gaze of the other and Levinas's later development of the face of the other made interpersonal experience a central category. We become objects under the other's look, and we discover ourselves only through others.
7. The absurd. For Camus especially, the human condition is defined by the absurd: the gap between our craving for meaning and the universe's silence on whether life has any. The proper response is not despair or false hope but lucid revolt.

Major figures

Religious / Christian existentialists:

• Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) — the founder; Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Sickness Unto Death.
• Karl Jaspers (1883 – 1969) — limit situations, the encompassing.
• Gabriel Marcel (1889 – 1973) — Catholic existentialist.

Atheistic / secular existentialists:

• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) — not always classified as existentialist, but the precursor in many ways: the death of God, the will to power, the übermensch.
• Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) — the most influential 20th-century existentialist, though he rejected the label. Being and Time (1927) made existential analysis the foundation of fundamental ontology.
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) — the public face of the movement. Being and Nothingness (1943); Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945); the novels and plays that popularized the philosophy.
• Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) — The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex applied existentialist thought to ethics and to the situation of women.
• Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) — The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel; emphasized the absurd and revolt.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961) — phenomenological-existential treatment of embodied perception.

Major texts

• Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)
• Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
• Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), No Exit (1944), Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
• Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Stranger (1942)
• de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

Internal tensions and rival schools

The central internal split is between religious existentialism (Kierkegaard, Marcel, Jaspers) and atheistic existentialism (Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir). The religious wing finds in the encounter with finite, anxious existence a precondition for the leap of faith; the atheistic wing finds in it the recognition that there is no God to leap to and the work of meaning-making is entirely human.

The great external rivals were:

• Analytic philosophy, which largely dismissed existentialism as imprecise.
• Structuralism (Lévi-Strauss, Lacan), which displaced existentialism in French intellectual life in the 1960s by arguing that the structures are prior to the individual subject.
• Marxism, with which existentialists (especially Sartre) tried to reconcile but never fully integrated.

Legacy

Existentialism's moment as a dominant intellectual movement was relatively brief — roughly 1945 to 1965 — but its themes diffused everywhere. Modern psychotherapy (existential therapy via Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl) draws directly on the tradition. Theology (Tillich, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer) was reshaped by existentialist categories. Literature (Kafka in retrospect, Camus, Beckett, the absurdist tradition) inherits existentialist preoccupations.

The long shadow on Western culture is hard to overstate. The vocabulary of authenticity, freedom, meaning, anxiety, and choice that pervades contemporary self-help, popular psychology, and ordinary moral discourse is largely existentialist. People who have never read a page of Sartre nonetheless talk about being authentic and finding their own meaning in distinctly Sartrean terms.

Contemporary scholarship on existentialism continues through Hubert Dreyfus's work on Heidegger and Kierkegaard, Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café (2016), Gary Cox's commentaries on Sartre, and the recent revival of interest in Beauvoir as a philosophical figure in her own right (Kate Kirkpatrick, Toril Moi). The existential-phenomenological tradition remains the methodological substrate of contemporary phenomenology of mind (Dan Zahavi, Shaun Gallagher) and existential psychotherapy (Irvin Yalom, Emmy van Deurzen).

The mid-20th century's dominant intellectual mood. The most useful philosophical tradition for the post-collapse-of-meaning question.