Existentialism

Classification

Period

c. 1843-1980 CE

Regions

Europe (origin)

Domains

Ethics, Philosophy of Mind

Overview

Existentialism names a varied movement whose figures begin from concrete, situated existence rather than a detached theory of human beings as fixed substances. Across deep disagreements about religion, ethics, and the scope of freedom, they examine self-making, responsibility, anxiety, finitude, and the problem of living authentically. Sartre, in particular, formulated "existence precedes essence," described human freedom in radical terms, and analyzed self-deception as bad faith.

Key figures

Søren Kierkegaard · Jean-Paul Sartre · Simone de Beauvoir · Martin Heidegger · Karl Jaspers

Positions held

• Existential Meaning

  Question scope: The Meaning of Life

Influenced by

• Nineteenth-Century European Nihilism

  This is the twentieth-century existentialists' engagement, not Kierkegaard's, whose work came first. Sartre and Beauvoir took the diagnosis that inherited religious and moral values have lost their authority as the predicament a free person must answer by creating values, not as proof that nothing matters.

• Phenomenology

  This is the twentieth-century wing rather than Kierkegaard: Heidegger, Sartre and Beauvoir took over Husserl's descriptive study of lived experience and his account of consciousness as always directed at something, and turned both on concrete human existence. Sartre subtitled Being and Nothingness an essay in phenomenological ontology.

• Philosophies of the Will

  The twentieth-century existentialists took from Nietzsche an ideal of authenticity as self-creation: the overman who breaks with the herd, creates his own values, and gives his life a style of its own. Camus read that affirmation of life as a form of rebellion against conformity.

Reacts to

• German Idealism

Later connections

• Feminist Philosophy Influenced by this tradition

  This is Beauvoir's engagement rather than Wollstonecraft's: The Second Sex borrows the vocabulary of freedom, situation and bad faith to argue that women are cast as the Other and held in immanence instead of the open future a free project requires.

• Kyoto School Influenced by this tradition
• Absurdism Reacted to this tradition

  The leap Camus attacks in The Myth of Sisyphus is Kierkegaard's, Shestov's and Jaspers': each of them escapes the absurd by restoring the meaning its recognition had withdrawn. Camus argued that the absurd must be held open instead.

References

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Existentialism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or, published 1843, the text Kierkegaard 'considered properly to begin his authorship'). The start year records that publication, because this entity counts Kierkegaard a member. SEP's Existentialism entry instead names him among the pioneers who laid the movement's conceptual groundwork, and dates the name itself to Marcel in 1943.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard, §§1–2 — Formation: Kierkegaard's authorship in Copenhagen, beginning with Either/Or (1843).
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Existentialism, §1 'Nihilism and the Crisis of Modernity' (the rise of late nineteenth-century nihilism shaped the movement's emergence) and §6 'Ethics' (Beauvoir and Sartre: no external table of values, yet human existence 'makes values spring up in the world', so existentialism is not moral nihilism)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Existentialism, introduction (Nietzsche named among the nineteenth-century pioneers who laid the movement's conceptual groundwork) and §5.3 'Nietzsche's Overman' (authenticity as self-creation and giving style to life; Camus on the overman's affirmation as rebellion)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard
• Being and Nothingness — Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir
• Either/Or — Søren Kierkegaard