Existentialism
existentialist · existence precedes essence
Existence precedes essence: humans must create meaning in a universe that doesn't supply it.
In practice
Someone stays in a career because it is what their training pointed at. The existentialist reading is that the training explains the position and does not excuse it, because remaining is a choice being made daily.
The common mistake
Reading existentialism as gloom. Its central claims are about freedom and responsibility, and its practitioners generally treated the recognition of freedom as a condition for living well.
Existentialism is the view that a person has no fixed nature settled in advance, and must create meaning through choices they are responsible for. Sartre compressed it into a formula in 1945: existence precedes essence.
What the formula means
A paper knife has an essence before it exists — a design, a purpose in the mind of its maker. Sartre argued that human beings arrive the other way round. You exist first, and what you are is settled afterwards by what you do. No human nature, no divine plan and no social role determines it in advance.
The immediate consequence is responsibility. If nothing fixes what you should be, every choice is made without an external warrant, and you cannot transfer the weight of it to your upbringing, your circumstances or your role. Sartre called the attempt to do so bad faith: pretending to yourself that you had no choice.
The mood and its sources
The tradition is older than the label. Kierkegaard wrote in the 1840s about anxiety as the dizziness of freedom, and about the leap that no argument can make for you. Nietzsche described the collapse of inherited values and the task of creating new ones, which is the background to nihilism. Heidegger analyzed being-toward-death, arguing that facing mortality is what makes an existence one's own.
Camus took a different route with the absurd — the collision between a person's demand for meaning and a universe that returns none — and argued for living without appeal rather than resolving the tension.
Simone de Beauvoir applied the framework to situation and gender in The Second Sex (1949), insisting that freedom is always exercised from a position, and that one is not born a woman but becomes one.
Authenticity
The positive ideal is authenticity: acting from choices you acknowledge as yours rather than from a script you have not examined. The demand is harder than it sounds, because most scripts are comfortable and invisible.
Concept web
Open the full webQuestions
What is existentialism?
The view that human beings have no predetermined essence and must create meaning through their own choices, bearing full responsibility for them. Sartre summarized it as existence preceding essence.
What does 'existence precedes essence' mean?
That a person exists first and acquires a nature afterwards through what they choose and do. It reverses the traditional picture in which a thing's purpose is fixed before it comes into being.
Is existentialism the same as nihilism?
No. Nihilism holds that nothing has value. Existentialism agrees that no value is given in advance and concludes that people must create and take responsibility for values of their own.