Origin & key thinkers
Existentialism is younger than the schools around it, and angrier. Its deep root is a single restless Dane: Søren Kierkegaard, writing in 1840s Copenhagen against a philosophy — Hegel’s — that had dissolved the living person into a vast impersonal System. Against it Kierkegaard set the single individual: the one who must choose, in fear and trembling, without a proof to lean on. His “leap of faith” is not credulity but the recognition that the decisions that matter most — whom to love, how to live, what to believe — are made on the far side of certainty, by a person and not by a theory.
A generation later Friedrich Nietzsche supplied the other hinge. His announcement that “God is dead” was less a boast than a diagnosis: the shared framework that once underwrote European values had quietly lost its authority, and nothing had yet replaced it. If no cosmic order hands down meaning, then meaning must be made — a thought the next century would take and run with. (Nietzsche has a room of his own in this pillar; here he is the bridge rather than the destination.)
The movement proper is a twentieth-century, largely Parisian affair, forged in and just after the Second World War. Martin Heidegger’s dense Being and Time (1927) gave it a vocabulary — thrownness, the sense of finding yourself already pitched into a particular life you never chose; the call to live in the light of your own death. Jean-Paul Sartre turned that machinery into a public philosophy of freedom, set out at length in Being and Nothingness and at a pitch anyone could follow in his 1945 lecture. Albert Camus, his friend and eventual antagonist, pressed the question of whether a meaningless life is worth living. And Simone de Beauvoir, far more than Sartre’s collaborator, wrote the movement’s sharpest ethics and, in The Second Sex, its most consequential book. They argued in cafés, in journals, and across a famous falling-out — which is fitting for a philosophy that prized the concrete, quarrelling individual over the tidy system.
The core ideas
The slogan that gathers it all is Sartre’s: existence precedes essence. A paper-knife is made to a design, so what it is for comes before the metal; a human being, by contrast, simply turns up — exists — and only afterwards becomes someone, through what they do. There is no blueprint of human nature waiting to be filled in, no fixed purpose stamped on you at the factory. You are, Sartre says with deliberate starkness, nothing but the sum of your acts. That is either terrifying or exhilarating, and the existentialists insist it is both.
From it follows radical freedom. We are, in the famous phrase, “condemned to be free” — condemned because we did not choose to exist, free because once we do, every value we live by is one we have, knowingly or not, endorsed. Even refusing to choose is a choice. This freedom is not pleasant. It shows up first as anguish (Kierkegaard’s dizziness before possibility): the vertigo of realising that nothing outside you will settle the question of how to live.
The commonest response is to run from it, and Sartre gave that flight a name: bad faith (mauvaise foi) — the self-deception by which we pretend we are not free. His example is the waiter a touch too eager, performing “being-a-waiter” as though the role were a nature he was born into rather than a part he is choosing minute by minute. We take refuge in our jobs, our reputations, our circumstances — “I had no choice”, “that’s just how I am” — to escape the weight of authorship. The antidote is authenticity: to own your freedom and the choices it makes, rather than disowning them.
Camus added the absurd — not a property of the world, but the collision between our hunger for meaning and a universe that returns only silence. His answer was neither suicide nor a consoling leap of faith but revolt: to live lucidly, without appeal, and to wring a defiant fullness from a life one knows to be finite. And Sartre added responsibilityon a startling scale: in choosing for myself I implicitly hold up a picture of how a person should live, and so — he says — I choose for all. Freedom, far from licensing anything, turns out to weigh more than any rule.
How an existentialist sees the good life
Ask an existentialist for the meaning of life and you will not be given one. You will be handed the question back, with the observation that the meaning is yours to make. There is no answer key in the back of the universe; there is only what you commit to, and the seriousness with which you commit. The good life, on this view, is not the discovery of a purpose already there but the creation of one — and then the courage to live as though it mattered, because in your hands it does.
That puts choice at the centre. Not the trivial choosing between brands, but the deep choices that disclose who you are willing to be: the cause you throw yourself behind, the person you stay loyal to, the work you refuse to fake. De Beauvoir gave this its most generous form. To will my own freedom honestly, she argued, is to will the freedom of others too — a meaning made in isolation, indifferent to the people it costs, is a meaning made in bad faith. Authentic living is engaged living: Sartre’s word was engagé, committed, in the world rather than above it.
And it asks you to live in full view of your own finitude. Heidegger thought we become authentic only when we stop fleeing the fact of death and let it concentrate the mind — not morbidly, but as the thing that makes a life a whole rather than an endless deferral. Knowing the play has a last act is what gives the present scene its stakes. The point is not to brood on the ending but to let it press you towards what you actually care about, now, while choosing is still possible.
So the good life here is strenuous and unfinished — less a state you arrive at than a way of holding yourself: awake to your freedom, answerable for your choices, willing to act without the guarantee that you are right. It offers no serenity to retire into. What it offers instead is something the existentialists thought rarer and better: a life that is unmistakably, riskily, your own.
What existentialism is not
The black turtleneck and the bleak café have done the philosophy a disservice. Existentialism is not nihilism. Nihilism says nothing matters; existentialism says nothing matters in advance — which is the opposite of despair, because it locates the source of meaning in you rather than declaring there is none. The mood is not gloom but a kind of severe hope. Sartre called his philosophy a humanism and meant it; Camus ends his bleakest essay by insisting we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Nor is it “anything goes”. Because my choices implicitly legislate for everyone, and because authentic freedom wills the freedom of others, existentialism carries a demanding ethic rather than none at all — de Beauvoir wrote a whole book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, to make the point. And it is not passive self-absorption. Its keyword is commitment; its heroes act. Sitting in lonely contemplation of the void is not the existentialist project but precisely the bad faith it diagnoses — one more way of refusing to choose.
Where it shows up today
Existentialism left the lecture hall and went to work in the consulting room. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the camps, built a whole therapy — logotherapy — on the claim that the deepest human drive is not pleasure or power but the search for meaning, and that a meaning held onto can carry a person through almost anything. Irvin Yalom later organised an entire school of existential psychotherapy around the “givens” the philosophers named: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. We keep the argument and the clinical evidence on separate shelves here, so rather than rehearse the science, that thread is one click away in the psychology pillar’s account of meaning-making in later life.
Outside the clinic, the vocabulary is everywhere — usually with the difficulty filed off. “Authenticity” has become a brand value and a hashtag; “find your why” and “live your truth” are existentialism rendered as motivational poster. Some of this is genuine inheritance: the modern conviction that you must author your own life rather than inherit one is a Sartrean idea that has simply won. But the slogans tend to keep the freedom and quietly drop the anguish and the responsibility that the existentialists thought inseparable from it — the parts that made authenticity hard.
The honest version is less comfortable and more bracing. It says the lack of a given meaning is not a problem to be solved but the very condition of a free life; that you are answerable for what you make of yourself; and that the weight you sometimes feel is not a malfunction but the felt sense of your own freedom. Keep the responsibility alongside the freedom and the modern revival points back at something the existentialists would recognise. Drop it, and what is left is self-help in a beret.
Which philosophy are you?
Eighteen questions read two axes — where you anchor the good life, and the question you keep returning to — and match you to one of the nine schools. Existentialism is one of them.
Where to go next
- Its closest kin: Nietzscheanism — the will-grounded sibling that first demanded you author your own values.
- The opposite temperament: Taoism — meaning through accepting the grain of things rather than forcing your own onto them.
- The other answer to a silent universe: Cynicism — freedom by stripping convention away rather than by choosing in its teeth.
- The modern scientific echo: meaning-making in later life in the psychology pillar — Frankl and the search for meaning, grounded in evidence.
- The symbolic parallel: the tarot card The Fool — the leap into open possibility, taken without a guarantee.
- Back to the schools grid. A guided “Which Philosophy Are You?” quiz is on the way; until it lands, the grid is the best map of where Existentialism sits among the nine.
Frequently asked questions
- Is existentialism just a fancy word for being depressed or nihilistic?
- No — and the existentialists spent a great deal of energy denying exactly this. Nihilism says nothing matters; existentialism says nothing matters in advance, which is a very different claim. The absence of a ready-made meaning is not a verdict of meaninglessness but an invitation — and a demand — to create one. Sartre titled a famous lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” precisely to rebut the charge of gloom; Camus ends his study of suicide and the absurd by insisting we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
- What does “existence precedes essence” actually mean?
- It reverses the older idea that a thing’s nature (its essence) is fixed before it exists. A paper-knife is designed for a purpose, so its essence comes first; a human being, Sartre argued, simply turns up — exists — and only afterwards defines what they are through what they do. There is no human blueprint to live up to or fall short of. You are, in his phrase, nothing but the sum of your acts.
- Were all existentialists atheists?
- No. The movement is religiously divided at its root. Kierkegaard, its nineteenth-century father, was a passionate Christian for whom faith was the ultimate leap; Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers worked in a religious key. Sartre and Camus, by contrast, took the absence of God as their starting point. What unites them is not a position on God but a focus on the concrete, choosing, anxious individual.
- Was existentialism a single, unified school?
- Barely. It was a loose family of thinkers, and several of its supposed members — Camus and Heidegger among them — rejected the label outright. What they shared were preoccupations rather than doctrines: freedom, choice, authenticity, anxiety, the confrontation with finitude. Treat “existentialism” as a centre of gravity, not a club with a membership list.