Existentialism

• 1. Introduction

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  Existentialism asks the most personal question imaginable: how does a person build a meaningful life when the universe offers no instructions? Jean-Paul Sartre addressed that question directly on the 29th of October 1945, before a packed audience at the Club Maintenant in Paris. He had just publicly adopted a label he had earlier rejected, and in doing so, he ignited what Simone de Beauvoir would later call "the first media craze of the postwar era." Beauvoir noted that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us." A philosophy once confined to dense German treatises had become a cultural phenomenon.

  But existentialism did not begin in that Paris lecture hall. Its roots stretch back through the 19th century and, by some accounts, all the way to Socrates. It is a tradition built on disagreement, paradox, and the refusal to accept easy answers. Among its founding figures is a Danish philosopher who wrote under pseudonyms to avoid declaring his own position, a German who declared God dead, and a Russian novelist whose characters collapse under the weight of their own freedom.

  The questions that run through the whole tradition are disarmingly simple. What does it mean to act authentically? What is the relationship between freedom and dread? And if the world is, at its core, absurd, what exactly are we supposed to do about it?

• 2. A Word's Disputed Birth

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  Gabriel Marcel, the French Catholic philosopher, coined the term "existentialism" (L'existentialisme) in the mid-1940s. He first applied it to Sartre at a colloquium in 1945, and Sartre rejected it outright. Then Sartre changed his mind. The lecture he delivered on the 29th of October 1945 was published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme, or Existentialism Is a Humanism, a short book that brought the philosophy to a mass readership. Marcel, meanwhile, came to reject his own term in favor of "Neo-Socratic," in honor of Kierkegaard's essay "On the Concept of Irony."

  The word itself has an older and stranger lineage. Although many outside Scandinavia assume Kierkegaard invented it, it is more likely that Kierkegaard borrowed the term "existential" from the Norwegian poet and literary critic Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven. Norwegian historian Rune Slagstad claimed to prove this from Kierkegaard's own words: "Hegelians do not study philosophy 'existentially;' to use a phrase by Welhaven from one time when I spoke with him about philosophy." According to a separate account, the philosopher Fredrik Christian Sibbern had two conversations in 1841, first with Welhaven and then with Kierkegaard, carrying the concept between them.

  This contested genealogy points to something true about the movement as a whole. It was never a single school with a shared creed. Sartre himself tried to pin down what all existentialists share, offering the formulation that "existence precedes essence." But even that phrase became a point of contention, as Heidegger later complained that Sartre had simply inverted a metaphysical claim rather than escaping metaphysics altogether.

• 3. Existence Before Essence

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  Aristotle and Aquinas taught that essence precedes individual existence, that a thing's defining nature is given before it comes to be. Sartre reversed this entirely. For Sartre, human beings arrive in the world without a fixed nature and shape themselves through their choices and actions. "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world and defines himself afterwards," he said in Existentialism Is a Humanism.

  Jonathan Webber clarified what Sartre meant by "essence" here. He read it not as a set of necessary features but in a teleological sense: an essence is what parts of a thing are organized to do together. A house has walls and a roof because its essence is to keep bad weather out. Human beings, unlike houses, have no inbuilt purpose. They are free to choose their own purpose, and that freedom is not optional. It is the condition of every action they take.

  Simone de Beauvoir complicated this picture. Where Sartre described a radical freedom in which nothing fixes a person's direction except their own endorsement of a project, de Beauvoir pointed to what she called sedimentation. Sedimentations are the accumulated products of past choices, and they do not dissolve overnight. They create a force of inertia that shapes how a person sees the world, and though they can be changed, such changes happen slowly.

  Heidegger, whose 1927 work Being and Time grounded Sartre's own thinking, later distanced himself from the whole framework. In his Letter on Humanism, he wrote that "the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement," implying that Sartre had simply swapped the traditional roles of essence and existence without interrogating the concepts themselves.

• 4. The Weight of Freedom

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  Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered the first existentialist philosopher, though he never used the term. He proposed that each individual, not reason or society or religious orthodoxy, is solely responsible for giving meaning to life. That assignment sounds liberating. Existentialists insisted it is terrifying.

  The concept of facticity, as Sartre defined it in Being and Nothingness in 1943, names the conditions a person did not choose: birthplace, body, the particular history they carry. Heidegger described it as "the way in which we are thrown into the world." These facts constrain a person, but they do not determine them. A person who treats their past crimes as an inescapable essence, and goes on committing them because that is simply who they are, is, in Sartre's terms, acting in bad faith.

  Angst, or existential dread, is the feeling that arises precisely because facticity does not decide anything. The classic illustration is standing at the edge of a cliff. A person fears falling, but also dreads the fact that nothing is holding them back from jumping. That dread, unlike fear, has no object to remove. It is the experience of one's own radical freedom. As the source puts it, angst is "before nothing," which is what separates it from ordinary fear.

  Despair, for Kierkegaard, is not just grief. In Either/Or, he wrote that "a person's unhappiness never lies in his lack of control over external conditions." In Sartrean terms, despair is a universal human condition, not an episodic one. As long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can be lost, they live in perpetual despair. A singer who loses the ability to sing and has built nothing else faces that condition in its starkest form.

• 5. Bad Faith and the Other's Look

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  Sartre's example of a waiter in Being and Nothingness is one of the most quoted passages in existentialist literature. The waiter performs his role with studied precision, enacting a version of what a waiter is supposed to be rather than acknowledging his own freedom to be otherwise. That performance is what Sartre called "bad faith." It is the denial of one's own freedom, disguised as social competence.

  The Other complicates this further. When a person encounters another free subject who inhabits the same world, they experience what Sartre called the Look, or the Gaze. In his example, a man peeping through a keyhole is entirely absorbed in what he observes, in a pre-reflective state. Then he hears a creaking floorboard behind him. Suddenly he perceives himself as another person would perceive him: as a Peeping Tom. That moment of shame, for Sartre, is philosophically decisive. It establishes that other minds exist, defeating solipsism. Shame is only possible if there is genuinely someone else doing the seeing.

  Notably, the actual presence of another person is not required. The creaking floorboard might have been nothing more than an old house settling. The Look is not telepathy; it is one's own perception of how one might be perceived. The freedom that generates angst is therefore not a private, interior freedom. It is shaped from the outside by the imagined gaze of others, by social norms, by the roles one inhabits.

  Kierkegaard saw a way out through the religious, arguing that a leap of faith could carry an individual to a higher stage of existence that transcends both the aesthetic and the ethical. Sartre, by contrast, in his 1945 lecture, described existentialism as "the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism."

• 6. Camus, Absurdity, and Sisyphus

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  Albert Camus resisted the existentialist label all his life. His novel The Stranger is considered, in his own reported irritation, "the exemplary existentialist novel." He preferred to say his works were concerned with facing the absurd, a concept he treated as distinct from existentialism's emphasis on individual freedom.

  For Camus, absurdity does not reside in the human being or in the world taken separately. It arises from the confrontation between the two: from the incompatibility between human beings and the world they inhabit. In The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1942, he used the Greek myth directly. Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, only for it to roll back down every time he reaches the summit. Camus believed that existence shares this structure. It is pointless in any final sense. And yet Camus argued that Sisyphus finds meaning simply by continuing to apply himself to the task.

  The most provocative line in The Myth of Sisyphus is the opening of the argument: "There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Camus was not advocating it. He was naming the fact that once a person genuinely confronts meaninglessness, the question of whether to continue living must be answered. The first half of the book is an extended argument against what he saw as the philosophical evasions of Kierkegaard, Shestov, Heidegger, and Jaspers, all of whom he believed made a leap of faith that sidestepped the problem.

  Camus and Sartre were close friends until they fell out. By the end of 1945, both had achieved what Beauvoir described as "a fame that reached across all audiences." Camus was editing the former French Resistance newspaper Combat. Sartre had launched his journal Les Temps Modernes. The absurdist and the existentialist were, for a brief period, the two most famous intellectuals in France.

• 7. Beyond Philosophy

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  Sartre wrote No Exit in 1944, originally published in French as Huis Clos. Three people are locked in a room in hell. They expect a torturer to arrive. None does. Instead, they torture each other by probing sins, desires, and memories. The line the play delivered to ordinary speech is: "Hell is other people."

  Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film Paths of Glory examined the "necessary absurdity of the human condition" through a fictional World War I regiment ordered to assault an impregnable position. When the attack fails, three soldiers are selected at random, tried in what the source calls a "kangaroo court," and executed. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, expanded on two minor characters from Hamlet who stumble through philosophical arguments while not grasping their implications. Jean Anouilh's Antigone, performed in Paris on the 6th of February 1944 under Nazi occupation, was written with deliberate ambiguity. Antigone declares she is "disgusted with the promise of a humdrum happiness" and chooses death over a mediocre existence.

  Existentialism also shaped clinical practice. Viktor Frankl, who briefly met Freud as a young man, developed logotherapy, which can be regarded as a form of existentialist therapy. Rollo May introduced existentialist psychology to the United States, drawing on the work of Kierkegaard and Otto Rank. In 1958, his book Existence brought the work of European existentialist analysts to American therapists for the first time. Therapists working in this tradition do not instruct patients to suppress anxiety but to use it as grounds for change, treating it as the signal that genuine freedom and genuine responsibility are both present.

  Simone de Beauvoir integrated existentialism with feminist thought in works including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity, a move that was, as the source notes, "unheard of at the time" and resulted in her alienation from fellow writers including Camus. Her work remains a reminder that the movement's central questions, about who gets to define their own existence, were never purely abstract.