Existentialism

The claim

Existence precedes essence. A human being exists first and defines itself afterwards, which means there is no excuse available anywhere — not from nature, not from God, not from circumstance.

What it held

Kierkegaard is the ancestor and was arguing against Hegel: a system may explain everything and still leave the individual with a decision nobody can make for them. Faith, on his account, is not a conclusion but a leap, and it cannot be justified from outside.

Sartre secularises this. If there is no God, there is no designer and therefore no design — no human nature laid down in advance. We are, in his phrase, condemned to be free. Bad faith is the universal evasion: pretending you had no choice, that your role or your nature or your situation decided it.

Beauvoir did the most rigorous ethical work of the group. The Ethics of Ambiguity addresses the obvious objection — if all values are chosen, is any choice as good as another? — and answers that freedom is the one thing that cannot consistently be willed for oneself alone. The Second Sex applies the whole framework to a situation Sartre had not examined, and is the more consequential book.

Camus refused the label and belongs anyway. The absurd is the collision between our demand for meaning and a universe that offers none, and his response is neither despair nor a leap but revolt.

How it argued

Phenomenological description of situations — nausea, anxiety, shame, the look of another person — used as evidence, and literature used as philosophy rather than illustration.

What it was arguing against

Systematic philosophy that dissolves the individual, determinism of every kind, and any appeal to human nature as a guide to conduct.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether radical freedom is compatible with the social conditioning Beauvoir documents. Whether an ethics can be built on it at all, which Sartre promised and never delivered.

Common misconceptions

That it is gloomy self-absorption. Sartre's lecture on humanism is explicitly an argument that the doctrine makes people responsible for everyone, and Beauvoir's ethics is about others throughout. Camus, who is usually called an existentialist, denied being one.

How it began

Kierkegaard writing pseudonymously in Copenhagen in the 1840s, then rediscovered in Germany in the 1920s and taken up in occupied Paris, where the questions were not abstract.

What became of it

Living, though the label went out of fashion. Its arguments are now spread across ethics, feminist philosophy and the phenomenology of the body.

Lasting influence

Feminist philosophy through Beauvoir. Psychotherapy through Frankl, May and Yalom. Postcolonial thought through Fanon, who was Merleau-Ponty's student.

Why it still matters

Its account of how people evade responsibility by appealing to their circumstances is as accurate now as it was, and its analysis of how a situation shapes what freedom is available is what Beauvoir added and what has lasted.

Put another way

A fork in a road with no signpost, and nobody to blame for the choice.

Where to start

The Myth of Sisyphus, or Sartre's short lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. Both are readable in an evening.

The surprising bit

Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in 1964, on the grounds that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. He is one of only two people to refuse it voluntarily.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Phenomenology, Nietzscheanism

Opposed by

German Idealism, Structuralism

Influenced

Post-Structuralism, Philosophy of Liberation

The verdict

The last philosophy to be genuinely popular, and the one whose central book was written by the person everyone treated as an appendage.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy