What is existentialism? A beginner’s guide to freedom, anxiety and bad faith

Existentialism is the name usually given to a family of philosophies that start from the situation of a single human being who has to live a life and cannot hand that job to anyone else. Its central claim is that we are not born with a fixed nature or purpose that settles how we should live. We exist first, and become what we are through what we choose and do. Freedom, responsibility, anxiety and the search for meaning follow from that starting point.

That is the short answer. The longer one needs some care, because the label is younger and messier than the ideas it covers.

Where the word comes from

"Existentialism" came into wide use in Paris in the mid-1940s, attached to Jean-Paul Sartre and the circle around him. Sartre was wary of the word at first, then adopted it in a public lecture in October 1945, published the next year as Existentialism Is a Humanism. That short book is still the most common first reading, though Sartre later regretted some of its simplifications.

Several of the people now called existentialists rejected the label. Martin Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre's reading of his work. Albert Camus said more than once that he was not an existentialist. And the nineteenth-century writers usually counted as forerunners, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky, died long before the word existed. So it is best to think of existentialism less as a school with a membership list than as a set of shared concerns.

The core ideas

Existence precedes essence. This is Sartre's formula. A paper-knife, he says, is made by someone who first had the idea of a paper-knife and its purpose; its essence comes before its existence. If there is no maker who conceived human nature in advance, then a human being first exists, turns up in the world, and only afterwards defines himself. Sartre, an atheist, drew the conclusion that there is no given human nature at all. Religious existentialists such as Kierkegaard or Gabriel Marcel did not, but they shared the emphasis on what the individual makes of the life in front of them.

Freedom and responsibility. If nothing fixes in advance who you are, then you are responsible for what you become. Sartre's harsh phrase is that we are "condemned to be free": we did not choose to be free, but we cannot stop choosing, and even refusing to choose is a choice.

Anxiety. Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety (1844), called anxiety the dizziness of freedom: the vertigo of standing before possibilities that are really yours. For existentialists anxiety is not simply a disorder to be treated. It is a sign that you have noticed your own freedom.

Bad faith and authenticity. The commonest way to escape anxiety is to pretend we are not free. Sartre's example in Being and Nothingness (1943) is a café waiter whose movements are a little too waiter-like, as if he were a thing whose nature is to be a waiter rather than a person playing the role. Bad faith is lying to yourself about your freedom: "I had no choice", "that's just who I am". Authenticity, a term that owes more to Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), is owning your situation and your choices instead.

The absurd. Camus's version starts somewhere slightly different. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) the absurd is the clash between our demand for meaning and a world that gives no answer. His response is neither suicide nor a leap of faith but a kind of defiant lucidity: one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The main figures, briefly

• Kierkegaard (1813–1855) wrote against comfortable, crowd-shaped Christianity and insisted that truth that matters must be lived by an individual. Start with Fear and Trembling.
• Nietzsche (1844–1900) announced the death of God in The Gay Science and asked what values could survive it.
• Dostoevsky (1821–1881) gave the movement its most famous anti-hero in Notes from Underground, a man who would rather act against his own interest than be predictable.
• Heidegger (1889–1976) supplied much of the vocabulary: being-in-the-world, thrownness, being-towards-death.
• Sartre (1905–1980) turned these themes into a full theory of consciousness and freedom, and into novels and plays.
• Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) argued in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) that to will your own freedom is to will the freedom of others, and in The Second Sex applied existentialist ideas to how women are made rather than born.
• Camus (1913–1960), with the qualification above.

The ideas also travelled. Frantz Fanon drew on existential phenomenology in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to describe how a person can be fixed by another's gaze, and in Japan Nishitani Keiji read Nietzsche and Heidegger through Zen to argue that nihilism has to be passed through rather than avoided.

Common misunderstandings

"Existentialism says life is meaningless." Not quite. Most existentialists deny that meaning is given in advance. Many think it can be made, and that making it is our task.

"If nothing is fixed, anything goes." Sartre and Beauvoir both rejected this. If I choose for myself, they argued, I also say something about what a human being should be, and Beauvoir in particular insisted that freedom brings obligations to others. Whether they succeeded in grounding an ethics is a live question. The cards on meaning in life and free will and determinism set out the rival positions.

"It's a mood, not a philosophy." Existentialism became fashionable, with black polo necks and cellar jazz clubs, and fashion is easy to mock. But the underlying questions (what am I responsible for, what can I know about my own motives, how should a mortal being live) are among the oldest in philosophy.

Where to start. If you want one afternoon, read Existentialism Is a Humanism and the title essay of The Myth of Sisyphus, then decide which of the two you would rather argue with. If you prefer fiction, Sartre's Nausea or Camus's The Stranger will show you the mood before the theory. And if you want to test the ideas on your own life, our members' threads on bad faith, choosing without reasons and the absurd are a good place to post your first objection.