Existentialism
Starting from lived existence, always in a situation, never finished: a finite shaping itself through its choices, with no instructions provided.
1843 – 1980
A current born of 's revolt against 's system and of 's announcement of the « death of God », which takes concrete, singular existence rather than abstract essence as philosophy's starting point. Heir to the of and , it has its hour in postwar Paris, where , and turn it into a philosophy of commitment. The school is split by a divide that does not stop it from sharing its founding theses: a Christian wing (Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Marcel) and an atheist one (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus). Against every given morality and every guaranteed salvation, it puts to the individual the question of what they make of their freedom, and shaped existential psychology, theology, literature and feminist thought through The Second Sex.
: a human being is at first nothing, and is only what they make of themselves.
Man is : with no received nature or value to decide in their stead, they alone answer for everything they do.
The truth that matters is reached not from above but in the first person: the lived subjectivity of the singular individual, not the system, is the ground of philosophy.
To exist is to project oneself toward a future one has to be: the human being never coincides with what they are, but runs ahead of themselves.
No providence gives life a in advance: meaning is not found but made, through the commitments one assumes.
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Justification
The movement privileges concrete existence, lived in the first person, against the abstract rational systems that claim to deduce everything (Hegel): the truth that commits is grasped in the situation, in anguish, in choice, not in a disembodied reason. It is not for all that an empiricism of facts, and the figures diverge, which keeps the movement near the median, leaning slightly toward lived experience.
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript · Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
Justification
A common trait beyond the movement's divisions: the refusal of the grand rational system that would claim to enclose reality within objective, impersonal certainties, in Hegel's manner. The truth that matters is not contemplated, it is undergone and appropriated in existence, truth is subjectivity (Kierkegaard). On the rest the figures diverge, from Kierkegaardian faith to the cogito that Sartre upholds as absolute truth, which forbids ranging the movement squarely on the skeptical side: it chiefly shifts the locus of the true, from the system to the subject.
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Justification
A manufactured object, a paper-knife, presupposes in the artisan's mind the concept and function that define it: its essence precedes its existence. Lacking an artisan God, the human being cannot be thought this way: there is no prior essence to realize, the person first exists and only then defines themselves by what they make of themselves. The movement thus overturns the whole of , from to theology: there is no model of man preceding singular men, and already set the existing individual's becoming-a-self against the system's Hegelian essence.
Man first exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, and defines himself afterward. If man as the existentialist conceives him is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.Existentialism Is a Humanism
Existentialism Is a Humanism · Being and Nothingness
Justification
If the human being has no received essence, nothing within or outside them decides in their stead: they are their freedom itself, not because they enjoy a comfortable free will, but because no value, no nature, no order spares them from choosing. Hence the reversal of : to invoke one's passions, milieu or character as an excuse is , for it is my choices that give them their grip. The situation into which one is thrown does not contradict this freedom but is its material: it is the freely assumed project that constitutes an obstacle as an obstacle, against the illusion of being acted on from without.
Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.Existentialism Is a Humanism
Being and Nothingness · Existentialism Is a Humanism
Justification
Because existence precedes essence, meaning cannot pre-exist the individual who bears it: neither providence, nor nature, nor the progress of History delivers a purpose to life in advance. Yet meaning is not abolished but displaced: it becomes a task, what each person brings about through their commitments. Here the movement parts ways with nihilism as much as with the religions of salvation, for to give up a given meaning is not to conclude to absurdity but to charge the individual with answering, as sets revolt rather than despair against the absence of meaning.
Existentialism Is a Humanism · Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Justification
A being without essence cannot be defined by what it already is, only by what it reaches toward: existence is project, a thrust toward a future it has to be. names this structure being-ahead-of-itself, and takes it up: it is the aimed-at future that retrospectively illuminates the past and gives it its meaning, not the reverse. The primacy of the future thus sets the movement apart from the wisdoms of the present such as or , for whom living well is gathering the instant: here, to live is to project oneself and never to coincide with oneself.
Being and Nothingness · Heidegger, Being and Time
Justification
There are truths one cannot hold at arm's length as an object of knowledge: what death, love or faith are for me can be grasped only in the first person, by the one who undergoes them and stakes themselves on them. draws from this his watchword against : « subjectivity is truth », for the objective system, in thinking humanity in general, forgets the singular existing individual who thinks. From this inwardness to the Sartrean for-itself, the movement makes the lived point of view the ground of philosophy; but since to exist is to commit oneself in the world, this inwardness is no contemplative withdrawal.
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript · Being and Nothingness
Justification
Against the dualism of , who makes the body an extended thing distinct from the mind, existence is said to be embodied: I do not have a body as one owns an instrument, I am my body, the anchored point of view from which the world opens to me. makes it the lived body, neither pure object nor pure consciousness, and adds that it is also that by which I expose myself to the gaze of others, who grasp me from outside as a thing. It is through the body that I am situated, and so committed.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Justification
In the existential tradition, finitude is no external accident but what individualizes existence: for , Dasein (being-there) is being-toward-death, and resolute anticipation of one's own death wrests one from inauthenticity, the opposite of . qualifies this thesis, but the movement unanimously rejects consoling immortality.
Heidegger, Being and Time
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Justification
Existentialism does not receive the good from a nature or a heaven of values: the successful life is the authentic existence that assumes its freedom and realizes itself in chosen projects. This self-realization carries a quasi-moral demand, authenticity and responsibility against bad faith, without merging into a pleasure or a codified virtue.
Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism · Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Justification
Existentialism takes up desire and passion as part of free engagement in the world, against any morality of resignation or asceticism. Desire is neither to be extinguished nor merely disciplined: it expresses the way the existing self projects and chooses itself, to be lucidly assumed rather than fled.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness · Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Justification
The existentialist view of reality is contingent, gratuitous, without rational guarantee: nausea before brute existence and the anguish of freedom give the movement a tragic tonality, close to the sense of . It remains tempered, however, by confidence in commitment and action.
Nausea · Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
Justification
The self is no fixed substance hidden behind existence: it is a task, something made through one's choices, whose unity is only the narrative unity of the project that takes it up. For the self is a relation that relates to itself and must be won; for the for-itself has no given essence. Hence a conception of the self as constructed, close to narrativism.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death · Being and Nothingness
Justification
Applied to social identities, the thesis of existence without essence denies that they are natural givens: it is who draws the decisive formula, « one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman », making gender a historically constructed situation and not a nature. The Jew, for , likewise has no essence: it is the gaze of others that fixes them, and to take up that identity as an assumed project, rather than suffer or flee it, belongs to freedom, not to essence.
Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew; Beauvoir, The Second Sex
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Justification
Existentialism refuses any pre-given morality: with no values inscribed in things, the good life lies in authenticity, assuming one's freedom and responsibility without bad faith. Beauvoir draws from this a demand of care: to will one's own freedom is to will that of others. An ethics of virtue (authenticity) and of care (the freedom of others), more than of rule or calculation.
Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism · Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Justification
If God does not exist, no table of values is written in an intelligible heaven: values are created by human choices. nonetheless holds that in choosing oneself one chooses for all humanity, which brings the position closer to constructivism than to sheer relativism.
Existentialism Is a Humanism · Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
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Justification
The direct corollary of the thesis of existence without prior essence is the refusal of a fixed human nature determining in advance what we are: man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. What defines us belongs to self-construction and to the historical situation, not to an invariant biological given.
Existentialism Is a Humanism · Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Justification
Affects are not mere disturbances to be mastered by reason: anguish, nausea, and despair are disclosive moods that reveal the human condition, its freedom and its contingency. 's anxiety before the possible and 's anguish before freedom grant access to a truth that intellectual analysis alone would miss.
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety · Being and Nothingness