Continental · 1840s forerunners; heyday 1940s–1960s
Existentialism
Existence precedes essence: humans are not born with a fixed nature but make themselves through free choices for which they alone are responsible.
How should I live if no given nature or order tells me?
Kierkegaard rebelled against Hegel’s all-embracing system, which he thought left no room for the anxious, choosing individual; Nietzsche announced that “God is dead”. After two world wars, occupation and the Holocaust, French writers such as Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus turned these themes into a philosophy of freedom in a world without given meaning.
A paper knife is designed before it is made, so its essence comes first. If there is no designer of human nature, Sartre argued, we exist first and define ourselves afterwards by what we do. So we cannot blame nature, God or society for our choices; pretending we have no choice is “bad faith”.
- Existence precedes essence.
- We are condemned to be free and responsible for what we make of ourselves.
- Anxiety and absurdity are honest responses to a world without given meaning.
It shaped postwar literature, theatre, psychotherapy and feminism, and its vocabulary of authenticity, anxiety and the absurd entered everyday speech.
Thinkers
1813–1855Søren KierkegaardDanish Christian thinker of the anxious, choosing individual1844–1900Friedrich NietzscheGerman philologist who diagnosed the death of God1905–1980Jean-Paul SartreParisian novelist and philosopher, the public face of existentialism1908–1986Simone de BeauvoirFrench existentialist whose The Second Sex reshaped feminism1913–1960Albert CamusAlgerian-born French writer of the absurd and of revoltKey texts
Where it came from
Reacted againstGerman IdealismKierkegaard rejected Hegel’s all-explaining system in the name of the single individual who must choose.Grew out of
Socratic philosophyKierkegaard took Socrates’ irony and self-examination as the model of existing thoughtfully.Grew out of
PhenomenologySartre and Beauvoir used Husserl’s and Heidegger’s method to describe freedom, anxiety and bad faith; Being and Nothingness is subtitled “an essay on phenomenological ontology”.
What it led to
Opposed byStructuralismLévi-Strauss attacked Sartre’s subject-centred philosophy of history; structures, not free choices, moved to the fore.Carried on by
Feminist philosophyBeauvoir applied existentialist freedom to women: one is not born but becomes a woman.Carried on by
Postcolonial thoughtFanon wrote in dialogue with Sartre, who prefaced The Wretched of the Earth.
Its answers to the big questions
EthicsHow should one live?Nothing decides for you. You make yourself by your choices, and must own them.God & the ultimateIs there a ground of everything?Not by proof but by a leap of faith, made in fear and trembling.God & the ultimateIs there a ground of everything?“God is dead”, and we must now create values without him.On the record
Existentialism is drawn from 1843 to 1980: forerunners in the 1840s, a heyday in the 1940s–1960s.
These bounds are a convention, as the label is open-ended: the word was introduced by Gabriel Marcel in 1943, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are its acknowledged forerunners, and it peaked in post-war France. 1843 is Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and 1980 the death of Sartre; the movement still has academic heirs.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Existentialism”