Existentialism — Philosophical movement of the 19th–20th centuries affirming the primacy of concrete, singular individual existence over any abstract essence or totalising system. The name derives from existence (Latin existere, “to stand out,” “to come into being”) and took hold in postwar France. Sartre’s formula “existence precedes essence” encapsulates its central thesis: human beings possess no fixed nature given in advance but constitute themselves through free choices, bearing responsibility for what they make of themselves. Kierkegaard is considered the precursor, opposing passionate subjectivity to the Hegelian system and emphasising anxiety, the leap of faith, and the irreducibility of the individual. Inheriting Husserl’s phenomenological method, Heidegger, though rejecting the label, provides decisive ontological foundations with the existential analytic of Dasein (Being and Time, 1927). Sartre systematises atheistic existentialism in Being and Nothingness (1943) and popularises it in the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (lecture delivered 1945; published 1946): consciousness (the for-itself) is pure freedom condemned to choose, without excuses or refuge in bad faith — the self-deceiving flight from one’s own freedom. Simone de Beauvoir applies the existentialist framework to the female condition (“one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”). Camus, though distancing himself from the label, elaborates the theme of the absurd — the confrontation between the human demand for meaning and the world’s silence. Marcel and Jaspers represent Christian existentialist currents, close to the themes of freedom, anxiety, and finitude.
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