Core Theses
Existence precedes essence — there is no fixed human nature given in advance.
The individual is radically free and responsible.
Anxiety, dread and nausea reveal our condition more truly than detached reason.
Authenticity — owning one’s choices against conformity (das Man, bad faith).
The world offers no ready-made meaning; meaning must be lived, chosen, or rebelled for.
“Existentialism” was a label coined in the 1940s (by Gabriel Marcel, about Sartre), then applied backward. Søren Kierkegaard is the father; Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche its prophets; Martin Heidegger its systematic thinker (who rejected the label); Jean-Paul Sartre its public face; Albert Camus its reluctant fellow traveller (who also rejected the label).
Two wings are often distinguished: the religious (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Marcel, Jaspers, Berdyaev) and the atheist (Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir). Literature carried it as much as philosophy: Kafka, Rilke, Beckett, Camus.
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Søren Kierkegaard
The melancholy Dane, father of existentialism, who set the passionate individual against Hegel’s System and faith against reason — “truth is subjectivity”.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosopher with a hammer who announced the death of God, unmasked the genealogy of morality, and called for new values — the will to power, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, amor fati.
Martin Heidegger
The philosopher of Being, who argued that the West had forgotten the question of what it means to be, and analysed human existence (Dasein) as thrown, anxious, being-toward-death.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The face of French existentialism — existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, and hell is other people.
Simone de Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex (1949) — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — founded modern feminist philosophy, and whose ethics of ambiguity argued that my freedom requires the freedom of others.
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related by shared connectionsPhenomenology
Husserl’s method of describing experience exactly as it appears — “to the things themselves!” — which Heidegger and Sartre turned toward existence.
Albert Camus
Algerian-born novelist and essayist of the absurd and of revolt — “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
What Is the Meaning of Life?
Liberation, virtue, tranquillity, God, the will, revolt — the great answers to the greatest question.
What Is the Self?
From ātman to anattā, from the cogito to the bundle, from Kierkegaard’s task of becoming oneself to Sartre’s nothingness.
Bad Faith
Self-deception about one’s own freedom — pretending to be a thing, determined by role or nature, to escape the anguish of choice.
Existence Precedes Essence
Sartre’s formula — humans have no pre-given nature; we exist first and make ourselves through our choices.