Existentialism is not a doctrine. It is a family of related insistences. Existence (the lived, particular, situated) precedes essence (the abstract, general, defined). The human being is not a thing with a fixed nature; it is a project that has to be made up as it goes. Freedom comes with anguish. Authenticity is rare and difficult. Death is not the end of life so much as life's organising fact.
From Pascal, the wager and the abyss. From Kierkegaard, the leap of faith and the lonely individual. From Dostoevsky, the underground man. From Nietzsche, the death of God and the will to value. From Husserl, the method of phenomenology — go to the things themselves.
It is not nihilism, though atheist existentialists are often misread that way. Sartre wrote a 1946 lecture, Existentialism Is a Humanism, partly to correct the slander. Nor is it pessimism. It says only that meaning is not given — it is made.
A six-figure tour follows. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.
1813 — 1855 · Copenhagen
Kierkegaard wrote against Hegel's system and against the Danish state church, often under pseudonyms (Johannes de Silentio, Anti-Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis), each carrying a different existential mood. His central question: how does a single, finite, anxious individual stand before infinity?
The book turns on the binding of Isaac. Abraham is a "knight of faith" because he both renounces Isaac (resignation) and expects him back (faith). The ethical (do not kill your son) is suspended for the religious (obey God). It is a scandal to philosophy. Kierkegaard insists that this scandal is the human condition, miniaturised.
1844 — 1900 · Röcken · Basel · Sils-Maria · Turin
Nietzsche resigned a chair in classical philology at twenty-five and spent the next two decades writing in increasingly unbalanced solitude through the Swiss Alps and the Italian Riviera. The work breaks into aphorisms, polemics, prose-poems, and the strange biblical pastiche of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He went mad in Turin in January 1889 — embracing, the story has it, a horse — and lived eleven more silent years.
Nietzsche is not strictly an existentialist — he predates the term, and bristles at every label. But every existentialist after him has had to argue with him. Heidegger reads him as the last metaphysician. Sartre takes the death of God as a starting point. Camus calls him a brother. The whole twentieth century, in some moods, is a footnote to Nietzsche.
1889 — 1976 · Freiburg · Todtnauberg
Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) is the most influential philosophical book of the twentieth century, and possibly the least readable. It begins by reasking, "What is the meaning of being?" — a question, Heidegger said, that the entire Western tradition since Plato had forgotten. His method (phenomenology, learned from Husserl) was to describe the structures of Dasein — "being-there," the kind of being for whom its own being is at issue. That is: us.
| German | Standard rendering | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| Dasein | "being-there" | the human being, defined by its concern with its own being |
| In-der-Welt-sein | being-in-the-world | we are not subjects facing objects; we are already involved |
| Zuhandenheit | readiness-to-hand | the hammer used vs. the hammer stared at |
| das Man | "the They" | average everyday self — what "one" does, says, wants |
| Geworfenheit | thrownness | we did not choose our era, parents, tongue |
| Sein-zum-Tode | being-toward-death | the structure that makes my life mine, finite, unsubstitutable |
| Eigentlichkeit | authenticity | owning my existence rather than fleeing into "they" |
| Angst | anxiety | not fear of anything in particular; the dawning of nothingness |
Note (margin): Heidegger's politics — his 1933 rectorship at Freiburg, his enrolment in the Nazi party, the silence after the war — are not separable from the work. The philosophy was used; the philosopher used it. Read with eyes open.
1905 — 1980 · Paris · Le Havre · Berlin · Stalag XII-D
Sartre studied at the École Normale Supérieure, taught at Le Havre (the city of La Nausée), spent nine months in a German prison camp, came home, wrote L'Être et le Néant while occupied Paris went on outside, edited Les Temps Modernes, refused the Nobel Prize in 1964, and lived for half a century with Simone de Beauvoir in a partnership that argued itself into print.
The waiter who is too perfectly a waiter — the gestures slightly too crisp — is in bad faith: pretending to be a thing in order to flee the anxiety of being free. The woman who lets her hand rest in another's, refusing to notice it is there, is in bad faith. We do this constantly. Authenticity is the difficult business of catching ourselves doing it.
Phenomenology of shame: I am a peeping subject through a keyhole; I hear a footstep in the hall; suddenly I am an object — a peeper, seen. The Other's gaze constitutes me as something I cannot directly be. Sartre's account of intersubjectivity is darker than Husserl's; "Hell is other people" is a line from Huis Clos, but it is grounded in this analysis.
1913 — 1960 · Mondovi · Algiers · Paris
Camus was a pied-noir Algerian, a goalkeeper, a journalist, a Nobel laureate at forty-four (1957), dead in a car crash three years later. He rejected the existentialist label — partly to keep distance from Sartre after the public quarrel over The Rebel in 1952 — but he is read in the same room.
The absurd is not a property of the world or of the human being but of their meeting. The world is silent; the human asks for meaning. Out of the collision: absurdity. Three responses:
In L'Homme révolté (1951), Camus extends the absurd outward. The slave who says "no" to his master is, in that moment, asserting that some line cannot be crossed — and that line, he argues, is shared. Solidarity grows from refusal. "I rebel — therefore we exist."
1908 — 1986 · Paris · Rouen
De Beauvoir came second of her year (after Sartre) in the agrégation in philosophy in 1929, and they remained intellectual companions for the rest of her life. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) is the closest existentialism has come to a systematic ethics; The Second Sex (1949) founded post-war feminist philosophy; The Mandarins (1954) won the Prix Goncourt; Old Age (1970) anticipated decades of work on gerontology.
Sartre's freedom risks being abstract — every moment, total, the same for everyone. De Beauvoir insists that freedom is always situated. The harem slave is free in some metaphysical sense; she is not free in any sense that matters until the situation changes. Liberation, then, is ethical and political, not just internal.
— published 1949, twenty years before the second wave it helped create.
The Café de Flore, the Deux Magots, the Brasserie Lipp — across the boulevard from one another on the Rive Gauche. Sartre and de Beauvoir wrote there because their flats were unheated. Camus argued with both. Boris Vian played the trumpet down the street. The whole movement, viewed from across an ocean, looks more glamorous than it felt.
Stripped to its joints, the argument runs roughly like this — Sartre's version, as set out in the 1946 lecture.
The premises are arguable. The atheist conclusion does not follow if you reject step three (Kierkegaard); the picture of choice is more individualistic than de Beauvoir would allow; the move from descriptive to normative in step seven needs more work than Sartre gives it. But the structure is the structure that all later existentialism either accepts or wrestles with.
| Author | Title | Year | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kierkegaard | Either/Or | 1843 | aesthetic vs ethical lives |
| Kierkegaard | Fear and Trembling | 1843 | Abraham; the leap of faith |
| Kierkegaard | The Concept of Anxiety | 1844 | anxiety as the dizziness of freedom |
| Nietzsche | Thus Spoke Zarathustra | 1883–85 | Übermensch; eternal recurrence |
| Nietzsche | On the Genealogy of Morals | 1887 | master vs slave morality |
| Heidegger | Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) | 1927 | Dasein, anxiety, being-toward-death |
| Sartre | Nausea (La Nausée) | 1938 | novel; contingency of existence |
| Sartre | Being and Nothingness | 1943 | magnum opus; bad faith; the look |
| Sartre | Existentialism Is a Humanism | 1946 | 1945 lecture; popular reply to critics |
| Camus | The Stranger (L'Étranger) | 1942 | novel; Meursault |
| Camus | The Myth of Sisyphus | 1942 | essay on the absurd |
| Camus | The Plague | 1947 | Oran under epidemic |
| Camus | The Rebel | 1951 | politics of revolt |
| de Beauvoir | The Ethics of Ambiguity | 1947 | existentialist ethics |
| de Beauvoir | The Second Sex | 1949 | woman as Other |
| Merleau-Ponty | Phenomenology of Perception | 1945 | embodied subjectivity |
Existentialism is sometimes mocked for its weather. There is too much anxiety, too much nothingness, too much dread. But the mood is not decoration — it is doing work. Heidegger's Angst, Kierkegaard's Angest, Sartre's angoisse: each is a way of describing the dawning realisation that no role, identity, or rule can do my living for me.
Fear is fear of something. Anxiety has no object: it is the felt presence of nothing-in-particular, which is the presence of my freedom.
Compare the Buddhist diagnosis of dukkha: the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence. The two traditions reach this point on very different paths and recommend very different exits. The diagnosis is similar.
Existentialism is, partly, a period piece. The cafés are gone or expensive; the cigarettes are illegal; the political horizon that Sartre and de Beauvoir argued from has been redrawn three times since.
But the moves remain useful. When a self-help book tells you that you alone are the author of your life, that is bad-faith Sartre with the difficulty filed off. When a clinician helps a patient see how a role has been confused with a self, that is therapeutic existentialism. When a feminist argues that "natural" gender is a long social fact, that is de Beauvoir's argument running through every later author.
The diagnosis of meaninglessness is also still around. Climate grief, late-modern atomisation, screen anomie: existentialism speaks to each, without solving any.
And the texts hold up. Notes from Underground, The Stranger, Nausea, The Plague, The Mandarins — read sympathetically, they still do the work of fiction at its best, which is to make a felt world from which a thought emerges as if it were yours. Existentialism is at heart a literary philosophy. That has been counted against it; it is also the reason it survives.
Olly Lennard's Philosophy Tube has a number of accessible existentialist videos; the BBC's In Our Time has multi-professor episodes on Sartre, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard. The embed below is the In Our Time on Sartre's existentialism.
Watch · Philosophy Tube · existentialism
Watch · BBC In Our Time · Sartre
"Being-there." Heidegger's term for the kind of being for whom its own being is at issue. We are each a Dasein.
"Thrownness." That we did not choose to be born here, now, into this language and history. The condition of Dasein.
Sartre's mauvaise foi. Self-deception in which I treat myself as a fixed thing in order to avoid the burden of choice.
To own one's existence, including its finitude and its freedom, rather than fleeing into "the They."
Camus's term for the gap between the human demand for meaning and the silent universe.
De Beauvoir's emphasis: the human is at once free and situated, transcendence and facticity. Ethics begins here.
If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.
Sartre · paraphrased
Deck 03 of Philosophy · Vol. VI · The Deck Catalog