Existentialism

Existentialism is unusual among philosophical schools in refusing to settle its own central religious question, and the refusal is close to the point. Soren Kierkegaard, writing in Denmark a century before the word existentialism existed, is now read as the movement's founding religious voice. He argued that Christian faith is not a conclusion reason can reach by argument but a leap made in the face of the absurd, undertaken by a single individual standing alone before God with no crowd, no system and no proof to hide behind. Fear and Trembling reads the biblical Abraham not as an edifying example but as a man asked to do something ethics itself cannot justify, and Kierkegaard's authorship circles back to that same demand: faith costs exactly what makes it faith rather than certainty.

A century later Jean-Paul Sartre framed the same starting point toward the opposite conclusion. If there is no God, Sartre argued, there is no fixed human nature handed down in advance the way a manufactured object's purpose precedes its making, so a person exists first and only becomes something through the choices that follow. Sartre called this being condemned to be free, since not choosing is itself a choice and no one else can be blamed for the outcome. Both lines share Kierkegaard's original diagnosis, that existence is concrete, first person and anxious, and that abstract theorizing about human nature in general fails to meet it. What Kierkegaard's leap affirms, Sartre's freedom is left to carry alone, and existentialism has never resolved which is the more honest response, because resolving it was never its project.

Existentialism is often described by its questions rather than its method, but the method is what let philosophers as different as Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger be read as one movement at all. Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology at the turn of the twentieth century as a discipline for describing experience exactly as it presents itself to consciousness, bracketing off the question of what really exists behind the appearance in order to examine the appearing itself with rigor. Martin Heidegger, Husserl's student, redirected that method away from consciousness in the abstract and toward Dasein, his term for the particular kind of being a human is, one that always finds itself already thrown into a world, concerned about its own existence, and moving toward its own death.

Being and Time, published in 1927, gave existentialism most of its working vocabulary before the word itself was in wide use: thrownness, being toward death, anxiety as the mood that reveals existence stripped of its everyday cover, and authenticity as the demand to take ownership of a life one did not choose to begin. Jean-Paul Sartre read Heidegger in a German prisoner of war camp and carried this apparatus into Being and Nothingness and into a public philosophy accessible well outside the seminar room. What phenomenology supplied was not a set of conclusions, since Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre disagreed sharply about most of them, but a shared insistence on starting from lived, first person experience rather than from abstract theories about human nature, which is the thread that lets a religious Dane and an atheist Frenchman count as the same movement.