Existentialism highlights the individualist nature of existence, asserting that each person creates the meaning of their life in the absence of an overarching guiding force. According to the existentialists, we are fated to carve out our own destinies as we strive to make rational choices in an essentially irrational cosmos. To that extent, we are able to exert freedom of choice, and it is by choosing to embrace our existence that we can escape the underlying ‘nothingness’ of the universe. Existence, existentialism holds, precedes essence, meaning that we may ‘write’ the meanings of our lives.
‘If man, as the existentialist sees him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.’
Jean-Paul Sartre
Although he would not have recognized himself as such, Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) is often cited as the original existentialist. In works such as Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death, he repeatedly explored the theme that humans have complete freedom of choice to determine the nature of their existence, which in turn invokes anxiety. In The Concept of Anxiety, for example, he likened the individual faced with choice to someone staring into an abyss, at once fearful of falling and also battling the compulsion to jump; anxiety is a common thread through existentialist thought, and Kierkegaard acknowledged its double-edged nature: ‘Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate . . . Anxiety is freedom’s possibility . . .’
Being and Nothingness
In 1943, Sartre published the single greatest work of existentialist thought, Being and Nothingness. He intended it as a study of the consciousness of being and in it he revisited two concepts he had introduced in his earlier novel, Nausea – pour-soi (being-for-itself, denoting conscious awareness of the self) and en-soi (being-in-itself, denoting the non-human world that has its own essence but lacks consciousness and self-awareness).
Sartre’s central tenet was that what humans can see is all that there is. He regarded humanity as defined by the absence of a preordained essence, and drew a comparison between the complete but incapable-of-change en-soi and the self-aware but incomplete pour-soi. Sartre argued that humans are left to create their beings from nothing, defining themselves by what they do – unlike, for example, a pebble on a beach that simply is what it is. He also echoed Nietzsche’s dismissal of the notion of a Godhead figure who supernaturally imposes meaning on reality.
By acknowledging ourselves as pour-soi, he said, we are forced to confront our own essential nothingness but, as a result, gain the freedom to create ourselves. Thus Sartre treads a line between nihilism (human existence as a nothingness) and liberation of the consciousness that places the individual at the centre of everything. As he observed: ‘Life has no meaning a priori . . . It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.’
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is another who is regarded as having prefigured certain existentialist principles, both in his rejection of God and in his description of the self-liberating ‘Superman’ (Übermensch; see here). Yet for most people, existentialism is most famously encapsulated by two of the giants of 20th-century French philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir (see here) and Jean-Paul Sartre, her long-time partner.