Introduction to Existentialism

Existentialism is less a tidy doctrine than a philosophical movement built around a shared problem: the human world feels confusing and unstable, yet people are tempted to escape that uncertainty by adopting rigid, all-encompassing answers. Existentialist thinkers treat questions like “Why am I here?” and “How should I live?” as unavoidable parts of the human condition—questions that can’t be settled once and for all by a universal system without losing something essential about what it’s like to be a person.

That shared starting point helps explain what existentialism rejects. It resists philosophical, religious, or scientific frameworks that claim definitive, timeless solutions to life’s meaning and purpose for everyone. Christianity and other systems of absolute guidance are singled out as especially attractive historically because they relieve individuals of the burden of creating personal meaning. But existentialists argue that such systems often provide a “divine” or “objective” perspective that doesn’t match lived experience—especially the emotional texture of fear, anxiety, hope, and disappointment. A key complaint is that these frameworks can downplay mortality by relocating meaning to an alternative realm (such as heaven or Plato’s world of forms), rather than confronting the fact that human life is finite.

Mortality becomes central to existentialist practice. Some existentialists insist that facing one’s impending death can sharpen awareness and break conformity with mass norms. When people accept that the only existence they can be certain of is temporal, they gain the impetus to take control of their own lives and choose values for themselves rather than borrowing standards ready-made by institutions.

This theme connects to one of existentialism’s most famous claims: “existence precedes essence,” associated with Jean-Paul Sartre. The lecture unpacks the idea by contrasting it with older conceptions of essence. In Aristotle’s teleological view, things have an essence—a set of necessary characteristics—and nature tends toward realizing it. Humans, on that model, are rational beings whose essence is tied to reason, and while individuals can choose whether to act according to it, they don’t create a brand-new essence over a lifetime. In theistic frameworks, essence is even more fixed: God determines human nature prior to any individual’s birth.

Sartre flips the order for atheists: humans arrive without a predetermined essence. Because people can make free choices, they have the chance to shape a unique essence through how they live. The lecture also notes that not all existentialists embraced Sartre’s framing—Martin Heidegger, for instance, is presented as skeptical of the slogan.

Finally, the lecture draws a line between existentialism and nihilism. Nihilism, broadly, is the view that life has no meaning or purpose. Existentialism doesn’t require nihilism; many existentialists reject any objective purpose while still insisting that individuals can create personal or subjective meaning. Nietzsche is used as a model for overcoming nihilism not by clinging to an external, all-encompassing system, but by “becoming who you are”—inventing values and living by them despite the difficulty and social backlash that can follow. The closing note is a warning, attributed to Nietzsche, that those who invent their own virtue may face hostility from “the good and the just.”