Existentialism

“Man is condemned to be free.” Few sentences sum up a philosopher so well, and few have been so often repeated and so badly understood. Jean-Paul Sartre was the public face of twentieth-century existentialism — novelist, playwright, militant, and intellectual celebrity — but behind the media figure lies a rigorous philosophical system built on an ontology of consciousness. This article focuses on the properly Sartrean theses: the distinction between the in-itself and the for-itself, the formula “existence precedes essence,” radical freedom and its weight, bad faith, and the experience of the Other. For an overview of the existentialist movement as a whole, see the dedicated article on existentialism. ...

Some philosophers build systems; others dynamite them. Søren Kierkegaard belongs to the second group — but with a decisive difference: what he wanted to rescue from the rubble of the great Hegelian edifice was not another theory, but the single individual who exists, suffers, decides, and dies. Against the ambition to explain the whole of reality from a single concept, he set an apparently modest yet abyssal question: what does it mean, for me, to exist? ...

For decades, philosophy textbooks treated Simone de Beauvoir as an appendix to Jean-Paul Sartre — the gifted companion who applied to the “woman question” ideas that were supposedly not her own. That reading is as tenacious as it is mistaken. Beauvoir was an original philosopher whose contributions to existentialist ethics and to the theory of oppression anticipate, on decisive points, formulations later credited to Sartre. And it was she, not he, who produced the work that would give twentieth-century feminism its philosophical foundation. To read Beauvoir as a thinker in her own right is not a gesture of historiographical courtesy: it is a demand of rigor. ...

No philosophical movement of the twentieth century shaped culture, literature, and our self-understanding as profoundly as existentialism. Born amid the wreckage of two world wars, the collapse of metaphysical certainties, and the crisis of traditional institutions, it placed at the heart of philosophy what the great systems had overlooked: the concrete, singular, unrepeatable existence of each individual. Existentialism is not a school with a uniform set of doctrines. It is better described as a constellation — a cluster of thinkers who, through diverse and sometimes conflicting paths, converge on one conviction: philosophy must begin with lived experience, with anguish, freedom, and the finitude of the human being, rather than with logical abstractions or totalizing systems. ...

What is the structure of reality? What truly exists — and what is illusion, appearance, or a construction of our minds? This is the oldest, most persistent, and most vertiginous question in all of philosophy. From Thales of Miletus, who in the sixth century BC declared that everything is water, to quantum physicists who now debate whether the universe is made of vibrating strings in eleven dimensions, humanity has never stopped asking: what is this thing we call reality? ...

Albert Camus Born in 1913 in French Algeria, into a poor settler (pied-noir) family, Albert Camus lost his father in infancy, in the First World War, and was raised by his illiterate, partly deaf mother in a humble district of Algiers. Tuberculosis would mark his entire life. A journalist and writer, he edited the newspaper Combat in the French Resistance and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at the age of 44. Close to existentialism — though he rejected the label — he broke with Sartre over disagreements about revolutionary violence. He died in 1960 in a car accident, at the age of 46. ...

Gerd Alberto Bornheim (1929–2002), born in Caxias do Sul, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, was one of the principal introducers and interpreters of existentialism and phenomenology in Brazil. His intellectual activity spanned a broad field: beyond existentialism, he devoted himself to dialectics, to the study of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and to the philosophy of art and theatre. A professor at several institutions—among them the USP, the UFRGS, the UERJ and the PUC—he played a decisive role in the philosophical formation of several generations. His writing combines expository clarity with conceptual rigour, which made works such as his introduction to philosophising and his study of Sartre standard reading for philosophy students across the country. ...

Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher, novelist, and playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong intellectual and romantic companion. A stay in Berlin in the 1930s brought him into direct contact with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, which would become the foundation of his thought. A prisoner of war in 1940–41 and later a central figure of postwar Parisian intellectual life, he made philosophy a public and engaged activity: he founded the review Les Temps Modernes, drew close to Marxism, and, faithful to his refusal of institutional honors, declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. His death, in 1980, brought tens of thousands into the streets of Paris. ...

Karl Jaspers German psychiatrist and philosopher, one of the central figures of the philosophy of existence alongside Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He moved from psychiatry (General Psychopathology, 1913) to philosophy, developing a reflection on human existence centered on boundary situations, existential communication, and transcendence. He was Hannah Arendt’s mentor at Heidelberg. After World War II, he became an influential voice on the question of German guilt and the ethical foundations of politics. ...

Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger was born in Meßkirch, in southern Germany, in 1889, into a modest Catholic family, and came to philosophy by way of theology. Assistant and later successor to Husserl at Freiburg, he published Being and Time in 1927, the work that established him as one of the most influential — and most controversial — philosophers of the twentieth century. The controversy is inseparable from his biography: in 1933 he assumed the rectorate of Freiburg and joined the Nazi party, a commitment he never publicly renounced and which the Black Notebooks, published decades later, revealed to be shot through with antisemitism. The moral and philosophical weight of this engagement remains an open debate. ...

Nikolai Berdiáev Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (18 March 1874, Kyiv — 24 March 1948, Clamart, France) was a Russian religious and political philosopher, often described as a “Christian existentialist.” Of aristocratic origin, he began as a Marxist — he was even internally exiled under the tsarist regime for his activities — but broke early with materialism toward idealism and Orthodoxy. He took part in the critical collection Vekhi (1909). Expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922, in the episode of the “philosophers’ ships,” he lived in Berlin and then in Clamart, near Paris, where he edited the journal Put and became the best-known voice of Russian thought in exile. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. ...

Simone de Beauvoir French philosopher; intellectual companion of Sartre. Founder of existentialist feminism. The Second Sex is one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Key Concepts “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”: the feminine is a social and historical construction, not a biological given Woman is the Other in relation to man as universal subject — a structure of oppressive alterity Existentialist freedom applied to gender: woman must recognize herself as a free subject, not as an object or complement to man Ethics of ambiguity: human freedom is ambiguous — we are free and situated; ethics demands assuming this ambiguity and acting in solidarity Influenced by Sartre — existentialism; radical freedom Hegel — master/slave dialectic (applied to gender) Husserl and Heidegger — phenomenology of situation Influenced Second-wave feminism (Betty Friedan, Kate Millett) Judith Butler — performativity of gender Queer theory Works The Second Sex (1949); The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947); The Mandarins (novel, 1954, Prix Goncourt). ...

Søren Kierkegaard Danish philosopher; the “father of existentialism”. Wrote frequently under pseudonyms to present opposing perspectives. His philosophy is a reaction to Hegel’s speculative system and the bourgeois comfort of institutional Christianity. Key Concepts Three stages of existence: Aesthetic: life oriented toward pleasure, novelty, aesthetics — the despair of inevitable boredom Ethical: commitment to duty, universal morality, marriage — the despair of unforgivable guilt Religious: suspension of the ethical by the singular before God — the “leap of faith” beyond reason Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844): human freedom as “vertigo of possibility”; anxiety has no determinate object (unlike fear) — it is dizziness before the abyss of the possible Despair (The Sickness Unto Death, 1849): unwilling to be oneself, or willing to be other than oneself — the universal condition of humanity without relation to God Subjectivity (“Subjectivity is truth”): existential truth is not attained through Hegel’s objective speculation, but through subjective and passionate commitment Leap of faith: Abraham who goes to sacrifice Isaac — an act that suspends the ethical and makes sense only before the singular of God; Camus criticizes it as “philosophical suicide” Pseudonyms: Victor Eremita, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Constantine Constantius — each represents a stage or perspective Influenced by Hegel — point of departure and principal adversary; rejects the speculative system Socrates — irony and indirect method; identified with him Plato — dialogues and Socratic position Luther — individual faith against institution Influenced Heidegger — anxiety, authenticity, being-toward-death Sartre — radical freedom, bad faith, existential project Camus — the absurd (but rejects Kierkegaard’s leap of faith) Simone de Beauvoir — concrete existential situation Existential theology (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich) Works Either/Or (1843); Fear and Trembling (1843); The Concept of Anxiety (1844); Stages on Life’s Way (1845); Philosophical Fragments (1844); The Sickness Unto Death (1849); The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859, posthumous). ...