One might assume that an overview of the history of existentialism would offer a definition of its subject at the outset. But existentialism, in principle, rejects a neat dictionary definition or formulation. It is not a consistent or systematic philosophy or approach to thought.
If anything, existentialism defined itself against systems: systems of thought like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s or “scientific” schemas like racism or positivism; systems of behavior like those of the mob mentality of the masses as in nationalism or the narrow norms of the bourgeoisie; or systems of production like those created by the industrial revolution.
As summarized by Søren Kierkegaard, the thinker most considers to be the prime mover of existentialism: “A logical system can be given, an existential system is impossible.” Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism’s most famous exponent, rejected the invitation to define existentialism: “It is in the nature of an intellectual quest to be undefined,” he wrote.
“To name it and to define it is to wrap it up and tie the knot. What is left? A finished, already outdated mode of culture, something like a brand of soap, in other words an idea.” Moreover, as Marjorie Grene put it in a work that helped introduce existentialism to English readers, “the more fashionable a philosophy becomes, the more elusive is its definition.”
Indeed, as Friedrich Nietzsche—one of the prophets of what emerged as existentialism—argues in On the Genealogy of Morals, “only that which has no history is definable.” So rather than a definition, we offer a description of existentialism. This description is historically informed, porous, and sensitive to national variation.
That is, to describe existentialism is to reconstruct an interchange among a group of thinkers from different regions who came to share a vocabulary for naming a set of problems in the shared setting of modernity. Neither is existentialism, as is so often claimed, reducible to an intellectual mood.
In fact, among those thinkers generally lumped together and labeled “existentialists” there are profound differences on foundational issues: irreconcilable positions on God and religion; widely divergent views on politics; and oftentimes opposed outlooks regarding ethics.
Albert Camus, for example, believed that God’s existence had little bearing on the human condition. In his notebooks, Camus remarked that “I often read that I am atheistic; I hear people speak of my atheism. Yet these words say nothing to me; for me they have no meaning. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
Martin Heidegger, in contrast, once famously claimed that “only a God can save us.” In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that much of modern theology in the Christian and Jewish traditions is a footnote to Kierkegaard, so influential was he on the thought of such Christian existentialists as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas.
Kierkegaard also was a thoroughgoing critic of all collective movements, insisting that where the crowd goes, untruth reigns. In The Present Age, he warned against the dangers of modern politics launched in the name of the people or the public.
On the other hand, politics became a cornerstone of Sartre’s philosophy. He maintained that existentialism “is precisely the opposite of quietism, since it declares that reality only exists in action” and, moreover, that “I cannot set my own freedom as a goal without also setting the freedom of others as a goal.”
In his 1946 essay “Materialism and Revolution,” Sartre stated bluntly that “the philosophy of revolution” represents “the philosophy of man in the general sense.” As such, Sartre was a fellow traveler of communism, Third World radicalism, and Maoism—in short, the ambassador of theory to revolutionary politics throughout the postwar period.
At the other extreme of the political spectrum, Heidegger—who profoundly influenced not only Sartre’s ideas but also much of existentialism—was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, which has posed a recurrent problem for those inspired by his thought.
If there is no coherence on matters of religion or politics, there is also no unity when it comes to questions of ethics. A distinguishing feature of the existentialists’ ontological and ethical projects is the importance they give to alterity: the being of “the other.” But there were extensive variations in how the relationship between the self and other (both individually and collectively) was understood.
For Sartre, “Hell is the other” (as Garcin, the protagonist of No Exit, famously proclaims), for others see us as we do not see ourselves. Sartre’s ontology reworked Hegel’s master–slave dialectic from his Phenomenology of Spirit in terms of the intersubjective dialectic of “the gaze” in such a way that relations with others were competitive by nature, an incessant struggle for recognition.
For Gabriel Marcel, in contrast, “love as the breaking of the tension between the self and the other, appears to me to be what one might call the essential ontological datum.” Likewise for Martin Buber; in I and Thou, love is not a feeling but rather a relation: “Love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You.”
Karl Jaspers put this in a different way: “What I am, I can become only with the other—the act of opening myself to the other is at the same time, for the I, the act of realizing itself as a person.” So for Marcel, Jaspers, and Buber, unlike for Sartre, all relationships can move beyond seeing others as objects.
When it comes to ethics per se, these differing notions of alterity entail differing stances on morality. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir rejected any form of absolutist ethics: there are no absolute values before they are embodied in action.
The epigraph from Michel de Montaigne to de Beauvoir’s Ethics sums up her view: “Life in itself is neither good nor evil. It is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.” Rather than seeking absolutes (or absolution), de Beauvoir called for us to engage in a process of “permanent liberation” because we live in “permanent tension,” always caught in ambiguity.
As such, “morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning.” In Either/Or, Kierkegaard, like de Beauvoir and Sartre, emphasized the centrality of choice within the ethical sphere of life. In Fear and Trembling, however, he suggested that the universal dictums of ethics are transcended when it comes to the dictates of faith.
He termed this “leap of faith” the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” In retelling the biblical narrative of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, Kierkegaard insisted on how shaken we ought to be by Abraham’s acceptance of God’s commandment that he kill his only son as the paradigmatic example of faith.
The reason Abraham should arouse fear and trembling is that his act entails obscuring the previously clear line between right and wrong, good and evil. These examples demonstrate that there is no accord between some of the most famous figures associated with existentialism on matters as fundamental as God, politics, and morality.
Yet despite these immense differences, there is a certain existential lexicon that informs the shared themes one finds across a wide array of thinkers. Indeed, it is Kierkegaard’s terminology that makes him a founding figure, for he gave a new valence to a set of notions that were determinative for existentialism, including the variously translated Angest (rendered in English as angst, anxiety, anguish, or dread).
But perhaps even more basic for the development of Existenzphilosophie was Kierkegaard’s revalorization of the term “Existenz” itself, especially in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard used the term to protest against Hegel’s encompassing Geistphilosophie, a comprehensive philosophical idealism “in which the individual disappeared like a wave in the sea.
He [Kierkegaard] introduced existence as a specifically religious category, meaning by it the single, finite, responsible, simple, suffering and guilty creature, who has to make a decision in the face of God and who consequently is more interested in ethical questions and in salvation than in abstract speculations.
Dostoevsky, in his turn, provided brooding novelistic jabs at liberalism and socialism; tirades against the prevailing Victorian ethos that underpinned the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie; rants on rationalism and reductionist scientism; and, perhaps most profoundly, reflections on the problem of theodicy.
In contrast to both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, the third major nineteenth-century precursor of existentialism, boldly declared that “God is dead.” Nietzsche went on to tackle the nihilist repercussions that stemmed from this declaration, radically rejecting the ramparts of religion and the absolutes of any metaphysical or epistemological system.
Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology, was certainly no existentialist, but in the early twentieth century he enjoined philosophers to return “back to the things themselves.” This was a call to reflect on how phenomena are experienced by consciousness removed from the commonsensical and scientific understanding of them to something more primordial: how they appear to us in consciousness as a result of human intentionality.
This entreaty had a profound impact on existentialism, which from Kierkegaard forward was critical of abstracting philosophy from the concrete concerns of human existence. Karl Jaspers, who left the normalizing confines of modern psychiatry, pushed his readers to examine life from the viewpoint of “limit situations” that involve suffering, struggle, guilt, and death.
In these extreme circumstances, Jaspers claimed, individuals are pressed against the social conventions that encase them and forced to decide anew on the existential issues that define their lives. Following Jaspers, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) introduced a technical vocabulary that sought a new way to formulate existential concerns within the philosophical tradition, introducing or reconsidering concepts (several of which are difficult to render in translation) like Dasein (human existence), Mitsein (Being-with-others), temporality, Beingin-the-world, Being-toward-death, and authenticity and inauthenticity.
On the French side of the Rhine, a key term picked up by Camus from Kierkegaard was the notion of the absurd. For Camus it indicated the irreconcilability between our desire for rationality and order and the maddening contingency of how things actually unfold in the world. Sartre, too, coined a number of concepts that expressed a set of ideas that other existentialists have pursued.
These concepts include nausea, the visceral sense of the world’s haphazard nature; bad faith, or lying to yourself by refusing to assume responsibility for your freedom; and, as alluded to previously, a social ontology predicated on the gaze of others.
These are some examples of what became a common vocabulary. Part of the history that we reconstruct in Situating Existentialism is how these terms or insights were shared and understood across a variety of otherwise quite different thinkers. As succinctly stated by William Barrett, whose Irrational Man helped introduce existentialism to America, what existentialists held in common were “such matters as anxiety, death, the conflict between the bogus and the genuine self, the faceless man of the masses, [and] the experience of the death of God.”
In short, existentialists addressed the most fundamental concerns of human existence: suffering, loneliness, dread, guilt, conflict, spiritual emptiness, the absence of absolute values or universals, the fallibility of human reason, and the tragic impasses of the human condition.
This shared terminology and set of themes cohered into points that queried the grounds of modern philosophy. When so much in modern thought seemed sterile and removed from ultimate issues, existentialists asked us to consider again an array of searching problems: Who am I? What is my purpose in existing? What does human existence mean?
How should I live? How should I relate to others? Is there a God? Is there a relation between God’s existence (or not) and how one lives? Why is there evil in the world? These are questions that can unsettle individuals to the core of their being, awaken them from the somnambulism of their lives, and direct us all to assume responsibility to create meaning from our situation in the world.
In responding to these questions, it is often claimed that existentialists begin with individualism: the solitary person living in the world. But this is untrue. Existentialism is plainly critical of Leibniz’s monads or liberalism’s abstract individual defined by universals (whether reason or rights) or romanticism’s solitary subject seeking connection with a greater whole.
It would be more accurate to say that existentialism starts with the problem of subjectivity: the question of human nature and the critical examination of how selfhood is constructed. What existentialists came to share in common, Sartre famously averred, was that “existence precedes essence.”
This has emerged as the bumper sticker for existentialism, and with good reason. By this, Sartre meant that the choices we make in the situations in which we find ourselves (where we are never alone) determine our essence. In other words, humans are not born with a pre-scripted personality or a preordained purpose or plan or a prefabricated essence conferred by God or nature or history.
Instead, it is our actions that define our identity, and it is our values that inform our acts. Human beings are like artists who creatively fashion the projects that constitute the meanings of their existence. This is true even for religious existentialists like Nicolas Berdyaev, who provided an existential twist on Genesis 1:27.
Berdyaev maintained, as would other religious existentialists, that if God created human beings in Her own image, then humans are creative entities like God and thus endowed by their creator with the capacity to choose their path in life.
The Archimedean point for existentialism is thus the question, “Who am I?” In order to reply, we must first reject the predigested mores, rules, orders, and routines of the modern world, all of which divert our focus from making purposeful choices.
Pursuing this thought in his Journal, Kierkegaard wrote: What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose . . . the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth . . . constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see . . . if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life? At twenty-three, Kierkegaard was asking the pivotal question: What should I do with my life, and how can it be purpose driven? In doing so, he shared with unbelievers and atheistic existentialists the assumption of individual responsibility for “becoming what I am.”
If this assumption is valid, then it immediately poses the question of what criteria govern what choices we ought to make. As we have already suggested, matters are murky here. Existentialists had no agreement on the solutions, but the whole assemblage of voices in the existential canon questioned the metaphysical underpinnings of ethics.
Even so, they sought to establish an axiology, the study of values. And all of the existentialists were concerned about the problem of nihilism: they wondered whether the transformations that structured the modern world had eviscerated the sacred, and paved over the terra mundi, so that meaning and valuation were at best relative and at worst groundless.
When they approached these concerns, existentialists did so in a new style. They were not driven to establish valid proofs or to systematize their convictions. Instead they sought to cultivate a clearing in life where posing these vital concerns came to the fore.
Each reflected on how he or she could write in a way that would force readers to reevaluate staid convictions and spent solutions. George Pattison has itemized some of their differing modes of expression.
These include “Kierkegaard’s own indirect communication, Dostoevsky’s dialogical art, Bultmann’s concern for a demythologized kerygma, Tillich’s doctrine of symbolism and his promotion of the visual arts, Berdyaev’s insistence on the aphoristic nature of philosophy, Buber’s retelling of Hasidic tales, Unamuno’s paradoxical prose and Marcel’s plays.”
These were some of the stylistic signatures of thinkers whose desire was to spur their readers from complacency to comprehension. Doing so involved “philosophizing with a hammer,” as Nietzsche put it. What were to be smashed were the new idols worshipped by modern thought: most emphatically unbridled rationalism and its twin, the idol of progress.
When Francis Bacon declared “knowledge is power” as the mantra of modernity, he did so as the herald of a new scientific method, believing it would lead to domination over nature and constant improvement of the human lot.
Yet even though the natural and human sciences have led to vast collections of data about all aspects of life, the result has not been coherence, comprehension, and certainty so much as confusion, malaise, and perhaps a technical sophistry by which we seek to stave off the piercing predicaments faced in the night’s sleepless hours.
Kierkegaard taught that, from the vantage point of existential concerns, “truth is subjectivity,” and “all essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.”
The progress stemming from political attempts at human liberation has led to greater independence but no less often to terror committed in the name of revolutionary violence, as Camus diagnosed in The Rebel. Even when turning from totalitarian regimes (which were Camus’s target) to the promises of liberalism and the neoliberal world order, we see that individuals today are more often mired in bureaucracy and commercialism than empowered by selfsufficiency and self-fulfillment.
As Pattison notes, existentialists thus “questioned the view that the satisfaction of material needs and comforts and the fulfillment of political hopes, whether nationalistic or class based, could satisfy the human question for meaning.”
Indeed, the tenor of the existentialists has been to refuse prevailing models of social and political change while holding firmly to what Camus called “rebellion.” The existential tendency has been to celebrate the rebel without a utopian belief in final solutions or the end of history and to waylay any politics of power that fails to recognize human frailty.
So while existentialists offer no consistent creed, code, or common program, they do share a lingo tied to a set of modern problems: the question of subjectivity, how to forge a postmetaphysical ethics, how to ground truth in differing perspectives, how to theorize in ways that are not reducible to a constricting logic or mode of rationality, how to establish social systems that do not lead to crushing conformity or homogenizing uniformity, and how to communicate this in a way that speaks to others so that they pick up the hammer and begin to smash those elements that are stultifying their own lives.
These themes, relentlessly pursued by those we have come to call existentialists, continue to have relevance for those who desire to break from the soul-constricting numbness of social norms and for those who are sickened by identifying worth with wealth or success with jobs, which are usually the iron cages of our bourgeois zoo.
These concerns still resonate for those of us in search of individuality in a society saturated by mass media, for those of us ready to assume responsibility for a world where genocide and racism continue after Auschwitz and apartheid, for those of us who rebel against the absurdity of a world in which a few hundred of the richest people have more wealth than half of humanity.
These concerns still speak to those of us in search of something transcendent after Darwin, after industrialization, and after the reduction of meaning to television sound bites and the diminution of communication to text messages. In short, existentialism remains germane because our very humanity, as Heidegger suggested, is such that humans are the beings that continue to ask: What is the meaning of my existence?
What “defined” existentialism, then, was less a shared school of thought than a shared situation. This situation was both discursive and material: dependent on a set of conversations about changes in the modern world. Summarily but not simply, it was a response to the atmosphere captured in T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land.”
Like Eliot, existentialists asked: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.” The broken world to which existentialism gave expression was the feeling that those who had lived through two world wars, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb felt in their bones: that traditional systems of thought and politics had crumbled in the trenches or the gas chambers or the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.
Existentialism was a quixotic howl in the night—about the extreme situations of modernity—that might yet open the ears of those who listened and yearned for a more humane existence. In saying this we can clarify some terms that help to explain the situation that existentialists spoke about. The modern world was shaped by the axial shift that followed in the wake of Columbus.
The processes of modernization that followed from and buttressed this shift—the growth of the nation-state, urbanization, science as the primary mode of producing and legitimizing knowledge, secularization, and the bureaucratization of individual life—transformed modern existence. These changes were impelled by technological renovations based on the steam engine, which forever altered what people do, where they work, how they labor, who reaps the benefits, and how families are ordered.
Harnessed to rail and then ships and airplanes, the steam engine brought about a revolution in transportation that shrank the planet and created the mechanical clock as the modern taskmaster that presides over every minute of our lives.
Harnessed to modes of communication, the steam engine ushered in a mass-media revolution that created global megaphones: the rise of the mass press (itself made possible by the cable wire, the telephone, and the camera) followed by film, radio, television, and, today, the Internet and wireless communications.
Modernity was the ontological outcome of these forces: the state of being that defined existence in the modern age. And the moderns were the artists and writers who expressed this new zeitgeist. The moderns forged modernism, which comprised the artistic movements in literature, architecture, visual art, and other cultural forms that responded to the processes of modernization.
What these art forms shared was an assault on the mimetic model of representation that had characterized the West since the Renaissance—a model claiming that art ought to represent nature, that knowledge was a reflection of the laws of nature, and that aesthetic forms should strive for the harmony ostensibly found in nature.
However, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle questioned the Newtonian view of nature on which that model was based. Yet even before this new scientific picture of reality emerged, modernists were rejecting the objective certainty of nature.
Freud and psychoanalysis critiqued the unity of consciousness, and the new discipline of sociology doubted the integration of modern society. All insisted on a multiplicity of frames of reference. Modernism suggested that reality could not be easily separated from its fictive construction and that modern identity was certainly not ontologically stable.
Art forms, the moderns maintained, were a product of fictive habits whose formulas were outdated. Old structures and old themes needed to be overturned. Piece by piece, in every artistic field, every element of the old model gave way: “narrative, character, melody, tonality, structural continuity, thematic relation, form, content, meaning, purpose”—all were questioned and rethought.
The different forms of modernism turned away from the external world to represent the modern psyche and often to reflect on the process of perception, representation, and its structures. The solidity of naturalism and realism in the arts consequently yielded to cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism.
In the novel, the omniscient narrator gave way to the shifting viewpoints of multiple characters whose perspectives were as fractured as their streams of consciousness. Truth was a matter of conventions, reality ungraspable, and subjectivity malleable.
Existentialists were a disunified group of moderns who were nonetheless kindred spirits in the endeavor to kindle a light in what Hannah Arendt termed the “dark times” of modernity. Existentialists became a major cultural force among the intellectual vanguard in the era of the two world wars, which W. H. Auden famously dubbed the “Age of Anxiety.”
In the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and in the long shadow of King Leopold’s ghost, existentialism—modernism’s philosophical discourse (even when this philosophy was advanced by literary, theatrical, or other art forms)—became among the most visible of the postwar cultural movements as the Iron Curtain descended.
The Cold War was an epoch dominated by two power blocs and a binary system of thinking, dividing the world into absolutes between us and them, good and evil, freedom and tyranny. It was also a period during which the concrete of the German economic miracle and les trentes glorieuses, the thirty years of unparalleled economic growth in Europe following the Nuremberg Trials, covered over the ashes of the crematoria and the ruins of the atomic bomb.
Existentialists—as did modernists in philosophy, literature, and theater— railed against burying our humanity beneath this dust cloud. French, Hispanic, African American, Jewish, and Christian existentialists were often dissonant voices in the midst of the freedom struggles of the colonized, women, homosexuals, and other outsiders that Ralph Ellison termed “invisible men.”
Existentialism thus limned modernity and exposed its hollowness, revealing that it rested on a void. In reflecting on this nothingness, existentialists pulled up the anchors that ostensibly undergirded the European culture of high modernity.
As a label for a set of tendencies found in the modern writers discussed so far, “existentialism” arrived as a global cultural phenomenon in October 1945 following Sartre’s famous lecture titled Existentialism Is a Humanism. Simone de Beauvoir recounted the moment: The origin of the term was contingent and capricious.
It was in fact Gabriel Marcel who first applied the term to Sartre, in the course of a discussion with a group of Dominicans at Le Cerf. At the time Sartre rejected this definition of himself saying that he was indeed a philosopher of existence but that “Existentialism” did not mean anything.
But subsequently, Sartre and his followers, were described as being Existentialists so often that we stopped objecting to this definition of ourselves. Finally we even agreed to define ourselves as such. And just after the war ended Sartre gave a lecture which he entitled “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” which shows how completely he had adopted this definition himself by then.
Sartre’s lecture and its subsequent publication came to define existentialism as it burst onto the world stage. The talk wove together the names of a set of thinkers whose work was now repackaged as existentialism, a postwar cultural fashion. Along with Sartre’s lecture, Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus was also much discussed and likewise carved out a legacy of precursors.
In 1947, the best-selling book by the Catholic personalist Emmanuel Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, marked the construction of an existentialist canon. Mounier even offered a diagram of the existentialist “family tree” that shows how Socrates, St. Augustine, and the Stoics were harbingers of existentialism.
The Gallic version of existentialism thus stamped its seal of approval on the systemization of the collection of texts, figures, themes, concepts, and contexts that defined existentialism. But a German story about what was called Existenzphilosophie had already been produced by Fritz Heinemann in a 1929 book titled Neue Wege der Philosophie: Geist/Leben/Existenz: Eine Einführung in die Philsophie der Gegenwart (New paths of philosophy: Spirit/ life/existence: An introduction to contemporary philosophy).
Heinemann argued that the philosophies of spirit (the Geistphilosophien of Hegelianism) and Lebensphilosophie (from the tradition of German romanticism, including Herder, Hamann, and Jacobi) were ceding place in contemporary thought to Existenzphilosophie, a term he coined to describe the approach of Jaspers and Heidegger and that would also be applied to the work of Buber and Franz Rosenzweig.
Heinemann’s book was not widely read, but his term and the interpretation of how the currents in modern German thought led to the development of Existenzphilosophie stuck. In the 1930s, Heinemann (who was Jewish) left Germany for Great Britain, where he continued to explain this new brand of philosophy.
Eventually, his Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (1958) would be a widely read introduction in English. Heinemann maintained that Heidegger’s existential phenomenology was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard and was the basis for Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology. A decade after Heinemann, Jaspers—who had already written much in this vein and had also produced individual works on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—published a book of lectures simply titled Existenzphilosophie (1938).
These lectures captured aspects of Existenzphilosophie that were remixed with a French accent before World War II, integrating splices of Spanish and Russian thought as existentialism migrated to and from Paris and across the globe. Summing up the construction of existentialism as an “ism,” Walter Kaufmann wrote: “After the arrival of Sartre, a number of other writers who had not called themselves existentialists or been so labeled before 1945 became identified with this label and triumphed in hoc signo.”