Existentialism (1840s – 1960s)
A century of philosophers (and novelists) insisting that human existence is defined by freedom, anguish, contingency, and the refusal of excuses.
What Defined It
The slogan, as Sartre fixed it in [[existentialism-is-a-humanism|Existentialism Is a Humanism]] (1945), is “existence precedes essence.” You are not born with a fixed nature that you later express. You first exist, thrown into a situation you didn’t choose, and then — through your choices — you make yourself into something. This freedom is not a gift; it is a burden, because it means there is no alibi. Every act is yours. This is why existentialists talk so much about anguish (facing your own freedom), bad faith (lying to yourself that you’re not free), authenticity, and contingency (the nauseating fact that nothing had to be).
The lineage runs:
- Kierkegaard (1813–55): the solitary individual before God, faith as a leap over reason.
- Nietzsche (1844–1900): God is dead, values are to be created, the free spirit says yes to life.
- Dostoevsky (literary, not philosophical — but his underground man and Ivan Karamazov are the first fully existentialist characters; Sartre and Camus constantly cite him).
- Heidegger (1927, Being and Time): we are Dasein, being-in-the-world, thrown toward death; authenticity means facing our finitude.
- Sartre (1938 [[nausea|Nausea]], 1943 [[being-and-nothingness|Being and Nothingness]], 1945 [[existentialism-is-a-humanism|Existentialism Is a Humanism]]): the French synthesis, fully systematic, fully public.
- Camus (1942 Myth of Sisyphus, 1947 The Plague): existentialism at the edge of absurdism. Life is absurd; we are asked to live anyway.
- de Beauvoir (1949 The Second Sex): existentialism applied to the condition of women.
Key Figures
Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Buber, Merleau-Ponty; literary ancestors Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Why It Matters
Existentialism was the first philosophy since antiquity that ordinary readers felt they could live by. It escaped the university, entered cafés, novels, and films, and gave the post-war generation a vocabulary for its disillusionment. Every later “meaning of life” conversation — in therapy, self-help, cinema — is working with existentialist concepts, often without knowing it.
Connections
- Sartre — the movement’s public face
- Being and Nothingness — the systematic text
- Nausea — the philosophical novel
- Existentialism Is a Humanism — the accessible manifesto
- Dostoevsky — literary ancestor
- Kafka — kindred spirit; The Trial reads as existentialist parable avant la lettre
Lineage
- Predecessors: German Idealism (as the thing to argue against); Pessimism (shared diagnosis, different metaphysics); Phenomenology (direct method); Russian Realism
- Successors: Phenomenology continues past existentialism; structuralism and post-structuralism react against it; humanistic psychology (Rollo May, Yalom, Frankl)