What is Existentialism?

The Question of Existence

Existentialism is not a system. It is a revolt — a movement born from the conviction that philosophy had become too abstract, too detached from the lived experience of actual human beings. Where traditional philosophy asked "What is Being?" or "What is knowledge?", the existentialists asked a more urgent question: What does it mean to exist as a particular, finite, embodied human being?

Defining the Indefinable

Existentialism resists neat definition, and several of its key figures — Heidegger and Camus among them — rejected the label outright. Nevertheless, certain recurring themes unite the movement:

1. Existence precedes essence — We are not born with a fixed nature or purpose. We create ourselves through our choices.
2. Radical freedom — Human beings are "condemned to be free" (Sartre). There is no script, no cosmic plan.
3. Anxiety (Angst) — Freedom brings dread, not comfort. We are anxious precisely because nothing determines our path.
4. Authenticity — Living authentically means owning one's freedom rather than hiding behind social roles, conventions, or excuses.
5. Absurdity — The collision between our demand for meaning and the universe's silence (Camus).
6. Finitude and death — Our mortality is not an accident but the very structure of our existence.

Historical Roots

Existentialism did not appear from nowhere. Its genealogy stretches back through several traditions:

The Two Streams

Existentialism developed along two broadly distinct paths:

• Theistic existentialism: Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich — for whom the encounter with God (or Transcendence) is central to authentic existence.
• Atheistic existentialism: Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus — for whom human beings must create meaning in a godless universe.

Both streams share the conviction that existence is not a theoretical problem to be solved but a situation to be lived.

Why Existentialism Matters Now

"Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself." — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)

In an age of algorithmic decision-making, social media conformity, and technocratic management of life, the existentialist insistence on individual freedom, responsibility, and authentic self-creation is more relevant than ever. Existentialism is not a historical curiosity — it is an ongoing challenge.

The Phenomenological Connection

Existentialism owes an enormous debt to phenomenology, the philosophical method developed by Edmund Husserl. By bracketing metaphysical assumptions and returning "to the things themselves," phenomenology gave existentialists the tools to describe lived experience with philosophical rigor. Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty all began as phenomenologists before pushing the method in existentialist directions.

Course Overview

Over twelve lessons, we will:

• Trace the movement from its 19th-century origins through its 20th-century peak
• Engage closely with primary texts and key arguments
• Explore the intersections of existentialism with politics, art, feminism, and psychology
• Confront the questions that the existentialists left for us

Let us begin with the thinker who started it all.