What is Existentialism? (1) Defining the Term
What I Wish I Knew about Existential Philosophy from the Start (Part 1)
Here on Philosophy Walkthroughs, I’m beginning to experiment with some new formats. I’ll still continue the core series of step-by-step walkthroughs of philosophy texts. But alongside that, I’ll be adding new kinds of topical walkthroughs—posts that focus on key philosophical ideas, themes, or traditions.
This first post on existentialism is an example of that new approach. It offers a topical walkthrough that introduces what existentialism is about and sets the stage for deeper exploration in the future.
This is a free post of a paid series.
When I First Started Studying Existentialism
When I first began studying existentialism, I found it overwhelming. The texts were dense, the language often obscure, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking for. Each philosopher seemed to be doing something entirely different, and I struggled to understand what, if anything, they all had in common. Without a sense of the bigger picture, I got lost in the details.
Now that I’ve spent years studying and teaching these works, I understand why it felt so difficult.
Existentialism is hard to define—even for scholars. It was never a single, unified school of thought. It brought together a range of thinkers who often disagreed with one another, and some of them resisted the label “existentialist” altogether.
But there is still a basic orientation that connects them.
Today, as an instructor, I can help students find their way through this difficult terrain. I know where the guideposts are. I can point to the shared themes that give existentialist thought its shape, and to the differences that matter most.
This walkthrough is what I wish I had at the beginning when I was a student: a way to get oriented before diving into the complexity of the texts themselves.
The Diversity and Unity of Existential Philosophy
When I first began studying existentialism and turned to expert anthologies for guidance, I was struck by the fact that there didn’t seem to be a consensus on its definition.
Now that I’ve spent a long time wrestling with these different thinkers, I have a much better understanding of why I didn’t encounter a clear definition in the first place.
As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once said, there is not one existentialism but many—in the plural, so to speak.1
Existentialism was a very diverse 19th and 20th Century philosophical movement in Europe and beyond:
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Fanon, amongst others
Christians, atheists, and agnostics
German, French, Danish, Algerian, and Caribbean
professional academics and those disillusioned with the university
white men, women, and minorities
(not to mention a whole host of existential psychologists, psychotherapists, and literary figures)
Because existentialism was so diverse, even some scholars have given up trying to clarify its core perspective.
What exactly is existentialism? This is not a question with a straightforward answer. There is a real question about whether there is any philosophical unity governing the thinkers commonly called existentialist.2
But there is definitely something defining about all existential philosophy. The difficulty lies in saying what that is.
Key Existentialists Rejected the Label
What confused me even more than the lack of a definition was why these same experts called thinkers like Heidegger an existentialist even though he rejected the label.
I came to learn that many try to define existentialism as a whole with Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous definition for his own brand of existentialism: “existence precedes essence.”3
The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel coined the term ‘existentialism’ in a review of Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness. And Sartre and his followers did go on to popularize this term in France after World War II. But most today consider Martin Heidegger a key existentialist, and his major work—Being and Time—a key existentialist text. So I was puzzled when I came to learn that Heidegger rejected Sartre’s definition for his own philosophy.4
I still encounter this question when I teach existentialism today.
When students study on their own, especially online, they inevitably come across Sartre’s popular definition of existentialism. As a result, they often assume that existentialism is about prioritizing lived existence over the philosophical investigation of abstract essences. And in a certain sense it is.
But when we turn to Heidegger, it quickly becomes clear that he does not share Sartre’s view. In Being and Time, my students point out that the term “essence” appears all over the page. Naturally, they begin to question why we are studying Heidegger in a course module on existentialism when his work seems to place so much emphasis on the essence of human being.
Existentialism: Narrow and Broader Meanings
What I tell my students is what I wish I had known back when I was starting off: Sartre’s philosophy was only one branch of a larger existential movement in European philosophy in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
When most scholars use the term existentialism today, they are not referring to its original, narrow meaning—Sartre’s philosophy and the French existential movement it helped launch in the 1940s and 50s. Instead, they use it as an umbrella term for a broader movement in European philosophy and culture, one that also shifted focus away from abstract, intellectual questions, towards the immediacy of lived human existence—but not always in ways consistent with Sartre’s work.
To define existentialism in an inclusive way that fits the larger existential movement, we need to stop using Sartre’s definition for the definition of existentialism as a whole.
This is where I get to share with my students something that took me years to understand—the deeper unity behind the existentialist movement.
And in the next post in this short walkthrough series on existentialism, I’ll share with you the two core outlooks that give all existentialists a shared orientation.
Ricœur, ‘Renouvellement de la philosophie chrétienne,’ p. 51.
Joseph, Reynolds, and Woodward, “Introduction,” in Joseph, Reynolds, and Woodward The Bloomsbury Companion to Existentialism, Bloomsbury, p. 3.
Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, Yale University Press, pp. 20–22.