The word arrived in Paris in 1945, but the question is a hundred years older: how does one person choose a life when no system, church or science can choose it for them? Søren Kierkegaard, a melancholy Dane who broke off his engagement to write books under false names, answered with the leap of faith. Friedrich Nietzsche answered, a generation later, that God was dead and we would have to make our own values. Dostoevsky answered in novels, with characters who would rather suffer than be explained.
In the twentieth century the question got a method. Husserl taught philosophers to describe experience exactly as it presents itself; his student Heidegger applied that to what it is to exist at all; and Jean-Paul Sartre, in a Paris just out of occupation, turned it into a movement with a lecture in October 1945 whose title was the creed: Existentialism Is a Humanism. Simone de Beauvoir, sitting in the same cafés, applied it to what it is to exist as a woman.
Existence precedes essence. A knife is made for cutting. A person is made for nothing in particular, and must decide.
Condemned to be free. Freedom is total and so is responsibility. Even not choosing is a choice you are answerable for.
Anguish and bad faith. Anguish is the honest reaction to that freedom. Bad faith is the dishonest one: telling yourself you had no choice.
Authenticity. Choose as yourself, not as “one” does. Kierkegaard called the alternative the public, Nietzsche the herd, Heidegger the they.
The absurd, faced. Life hands you no meaning. The existentialist reply is to make one; the Absurdist reply, next door, is to live without one.
Beauvoir is not a footnote to Sartre. The Second Sex (1949) is existentialism applied to the largest possible case, and it is the book from the movement that changed the most lives. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique, turned Sartre’s tools on colonialism in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). The Kyoto School in Japan, above all Nishitani Keiji, read Heidegger alongside Zen from the 1930s and asked questions neither side had thought to.
Sartre, Beauvoir, Heidegger, Fanon and Camus are all still in copyright, which is why our cards for this school carry Emerson, Pascal, Nietzsche, George Eliot and Vivekananda instead: the older voices who chose their own lives before there was a name for it.
Existentialism is the Romantic individual grown up and stripped of its optimism, and the reaction against the Rationalist faith in systems. Absurdism is its sibling: Camus refused the label, and the quarrel of 1952 is the border between the two pages. Emerson’s nonconformist, on the Transcendentalism page, is the American cousin, and the Cynic refusal of convention is the ancient one.
“Authentic” is now the highest praise for a person, a restaurant or a brand. Existential therapy, from Viktor Frankl to Irvin Yalom, is a working clinical tradition. And every argument about whether a life with no given meaning can still be worth living is this argument.