What Is Existentialism?

Where the idea comes from

Existentialism draws on nineteenth-century thinkers who never used the word. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered the first existentialist: books such as Fear and Trembling (1843), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and The Sickness unto Death (1849) put the single individual, choice and anxiety at the centre of philosophy. His emphasis on the concrete, existing person rather than abstract systems set the tone for much that followed.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in works such as Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Notes from Underground (1864) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), are usually counted as further forerunners. Both attacked faith in pure reason and asked how people should live once traditional sources of meaning lose their authority. Their influence reached the movement mainly through twentieth-century readers rather than any shared programme.

Sartre, Beauvoir and post-war Paris

The word itself was introduced by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the 1940s. Jean-Paul Sartre at first resisted it, then embraced it in a public lecture in Paris on 29 October 1945, published in 1946 as Existentialism Is a Humanism. His major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, had appeared in 1943. In that lecture Sartre answered critics who found the philosophy bleak, arguing that it placed responsibility firmly in human hands.

Shaped by the Second World War and the occupation, existentialism became a cultural movement as much as a philosophy. In 1945 Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty launched the journal Les Temps modernes. Beauvoir developed an existentialist ethics in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and applied existentialist ideas to women’s situation in The Second Sex (1949). Sartre and Beauvoir were the only leading figures who explicitly called themselves existentialists; Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time (1927) was a major influence, distanced himself from the label.

Key ideas

• Existence precedes essence — Humans are not born with a predetermined nature; they first exist and then define themselves through what they do.
• Freedom and responsibility — Because there is no fixed human nature to fall back on, each person is responsible for their choices and the values those choices express.
• Anxiety — Kierkegaard and Heidegger treat anxiety, or anguish, as a mood that reveals our freedom and individuality.
• Bad faith — Sartre and Beauvoir’s term for self-deception: denying either one’s freedom or the concrete facts of one’s situation.
• Authenticity — Living according to one’s own freely chosen commitments rather than simply conforming to public expectations.
• Freedom in a situation — Later Sartre and Beauvoir stressed that freedom is always exercised within real limits of body, history and society.

Existentialism in literature

Existentialism spread as widely through novels and plays as through philosophy. Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938) follows a man overwhelmed by the sheer contingency of things, and his play No Exit (1944) gave the movement its most quoted line, ‘Hell is other people’. Beauvoir explored freedom and responsibility under occupation in the novel The Blood of Others (1945). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy counts these plays, novels and stories as a central part of the movement.

Albert Camus’s novels and plays are often read alongside this work, and readers frequently group him with Sartre. Camus himself rejected the label and described his own position as a philosophy of the absurd. Dostoevsky’s fiction, meanwhile, is commonly read as existentialist avant la lettre because of its tormented, self-questioning characters. Fiction gave abstract themes such as freedom, guilt and choice a concrete form through character and situation.

Key works

• Fear and Trembling — Søren Kierkegaard, 1843. Kierkegaard’s study of Abraham and the leap of faith, a founding text for existentialist thought.
• Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864. A bitter, self-contradicting narrator rebels against reason and social progress, often seen as a forerunner of existentialist fiction.
• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1879–80. Dostoevsky’s final novel wrestles with faith, freedom and moral responsibility.
• Nausea — Jean-Paul Sartre, 1938. Sartre’s first novel turns the discovery of contingency into a physical feeling of disgust.
• Being and Nothingness — Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943. Sartre’s main philosophical work, where ideas such as bad faith are set out in full.
• No Exit — Jean-Paul Sartre, 1944. Three people locked in a room for eternity, the source of the line ‘Hell is other people’.
• The Blood of Others — Simone de Beauvoir, 1945. A novel of resistance and responsibility set during the German occupation of France.
• Existentialism Is a Humanism — Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946. The short published lecture in which Sartre defended existentialism and stated that existence precedes essence.
• The Ethics of Ambiguity — Simone de Beauvoir, 1947. Beauvoir’s attempt to build an ethics on existentialist freedom.
• The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir, 1949. Applies existentialist ideas to how women have been defined as ‘other’.

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