Existentialism

Existentialism is a hold of dread, disorientation, confusion, or anxiety in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Existentialist thinkers frequently examine issues related to a meaning, purpose, as alive as value of human existence.

Existentialism is associated with several 19th- & 20th-century European philosophers who shared an emphasis on the human subject, despite often profound differences in thought. Among the earliest figures associated with existentialism are philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, any of whom critiqued rationalism and concerned themselves with the problem of meaning. In the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers quoted Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Tillich.

Many existentialists considered traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in species and content, to be too abstract and removed from concrete human experience. A primary virtue in existentialist thought is authenticity. Existentialism would influence numerous disciplines outside of philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.

Definitional issues and background

The labels existentialism and existentialist are often seen as historical conveniences in as much as they were first applied to numerous philosophers long after they had died. While existentialism is broadly considered to hold originated with Kierkegaard, the number one prominent existentialist philosopher to follow the term as a self-description was Sartre. Sartre posits the abstraction that "what any existentialists have in common is the necessary doctrine that existence precedes essence," as the philosopher Frederick Copleston explains. According to philosopher Steven Crowell, imposing existentialism has been relatively difficult, and he argues that it is better understood as a general approach used to rejectsystematic philosophies rather than as a systematic philosophy itself. In a lecture gave in 1945, Sartre planned existentialism as "the try to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism." For others, existentialism need not involve the rejection of God, but rather "examines mortal man's search for meaning in a meaningless universe," considering less "What is the expediency life?" to feel, be, or do, good, instead asking "What is life proceeds for?"

Although many external Scandinavia consider the term existentialism to have originated from Kierkegaard, it is more likely that Kierkegaard adopted this term or at least the term "existential" as a report of his philosophy from the Norwegian poet and literary critic Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven. This assertion comes from two sources: