Although Nietzsche (and Dostoyevsky and Kafka in literature) has been called an existentialist because of his rejection of systems and use of aphorisms as a style of writing, it was Kierkegaard (1813-1888) who is considered to be the founder of this philosophical and literary movement.  Existentialism focuses on “the uniqueness of each individual as distinguished from abstract universal human qualities.”  (Cambridge 255).  In other words, existentialism rejects the idea that there could be such a thing as a shared human nature or essence.  To the existentialists, individuals were too varied to find one categorization that would fit all.

            The society that shaped Kierkegaard was both the high and the low ends.   While Kierkegaard was young, his family was poor, but his father later had great success and was able to leave his son financially independent, enabling him to live the life of a writer.  The family was strict Lutheran, but at university, Kierkegaard switched from theology to philosophy, and ended up writing in many forms throughout his life – philosophical, psychological and religious writings, fiction and literary criticism.  For Kierkegaard, experience in life, like falling in love, became a catalyst for authorship.  It was a public attack in a periodical that made him aware of suffering and the importance of the “authentic” person being able to stand up to the crowd if necessary.  (Hubben 11).

            Kierkegaard is “famous for his critique of systematic rational philosophy, particularly Hegelism, on the grounds that actual life cannot be contained within an abstract conceptual system.”  (Britannica CD ROM).  He explores “existence” and describes it in human beings as an ongoing process. The passions that work on a person’s development are referred to as the person’s inwardness, or subjectivity.  The self is moving through phases in life, or three spheres of existence:  the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.  The aesthetic is living for the moment, the immediate, and the person enjoys life reflectively, that is, through the arts.  But the aesthetic person lacks commitment, or the ethical, which endeavors to shape a unified self.  The religious, Kierkegaard believed, is achieved through transcendence towards true ideals.

            Kierkegaard criticized Hegel’s absolute idealism, as we have said earlier, because of Hegel’s claim to have found a single, overarching system.  Kierkegaard thought reality and the thinker are in process, and philosophy starts, not with skepticism, but with a sense of wonder and meditation that is infinite.

Like many philosophers of his time, Kierkegaard was of a divided personal belief. He adhered to Christian faith but refused to attend church.  He was unwilling to put God, or one’s relationship to God, within a philosophy, as Hegel had been willing to do. 

Existentialism evolved through the 19^th century and today we link it with Sartre (1905 – 1980) and of it being identified specifically with atheism.

Modern existentialism was brought to public attention through Sartre’s literary novel, Nausea and his philosophical work, Being and Nothingness.   He is known for his belief that human consciousness, or “no-thing-ness” is opposite to being, or “thing-ness”.  In Nausea, we see the start of his philosophy that espouses freedom of the individual. 

Sartre’s father died at an early age and he grew up in the intellectual environment of his maternal grandfather, a Sorbonne professor, and his uncle, Albert Schweitzer, the medical missionary.  He attended the best schools in Paris and early on formed the long lasting partnership with the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.    During his studies at the Sorbonne, he benefited from contact with the talented student body of that time, including Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil and Claude Levi-Strauss.

One of Sartre’s important beliefs was the concept of freedom and the accompanying sense of personal responsibility.  As a student of Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, and especially due to his own poor health and having lived through the war, he was sensitive to the stumbling blocks to human freedom,  But he remained a Cartesian and believed that human consciousness is distinct from the physical world.   “One is never free from one’s situation…though one is always free to deny (negate) that situation and try and change it.   To be human, to be conscious, is to be free to imagine, free to choose, and be responsible for one’s lot in life.” (Cambridge 710). 

His writings followed this “freedom to imagine”, and, as with Kant, how this ability can direct all our experiences.  He separated the self and the consciousness, and said they are not the same; the former is affected by the world and is an on-going process.    In his masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, he shows this division between self and consciousness, and the denial of the self as merely self-consciousness.  He defines two realms – consciousness (being for itself) and the existence of mere things (being in itself).  The former is not a thing (no thing ness) but an activity, and like Kant, warned against understanding consciousness as an object of consciousness, much like the lens of a camera cannot see itself, or as Eisenberg asks, how can the eye see itself seeing?  (Eisenberg 15).  Ultimately, it can only be aware of itself.

It is because of the “nothingness” of consciousness that we are able to imagine the world in a way other than it is, and see ourselves in new ways.  Sartre saw human freedom as necessary and self-determining, and this freedom is achieved through choice. 

Another category for Sartre was “being for others”.   We are not entirely self-determining because we regard ourselves in the mirror of other people.  How they judge our behavior becomes the way we define ourselves.  Sartre’s quote on this is famous, “Hell is other people.”

In his later work, he developed this idea and struggled to discover a method to rise above the conflict and insularity, the “bourgeois” consciousness, he had laid out in Being and Nothingness .  This project became political for Sartre; he participated in revolutionary acts, sold left-wing literature and turned down the Nobel prize for literature as a result.   As a thinker, novelist and dramatist, Sartre was in both worlds throughout his career, art and philosophy.  For him, literature is philosophy “engagé”, and he believed in existential-political action in the name of freedom. 

For Camus, being “l’étranger”, sometimes translated as “the outsider”, was one of the forces that shaped his life.  When he was less than a year old, his French father died in World War I and his family moved out of the Algerian countryside to the capital.  His Spanish mother worked as a charwoman to feed her family and Camus wrote of their biting poverty. Fortunately, he had an excellent teacher who helped him earn a scholarship to the lycée, and later to University of Algiers.  He read Gide and Malraux and joined the communist party.   As a journalist, he critiqued Sartre’s work.  After World War II, his own writings made him the spokesperson of his generation, and he portrayed the isolation of humans in an alien universe and the inability of people to know themselves.

            Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was more of a pure existentialist.   He efforts lay in the exploration of existentialist ethics, which she believed were determined by a human freedom that projected itself towards an ideal, open future.  She also criticized Camus’s idea of authenticity and the “spirit of gravity” that is characterized by people who identify only with specific human qualities, values, essences or prejudices. (712).  Her masterpiece, The Second Sex, brought together two inspired ideas, one existential, the other Hegelian, and put forth that one could choose between the path of immanence (passive acceptance of the life one has been born into or socialized to become) or, the path of transcendence of that presubcribed role.  She saw the necessity of challenging that role and imagining new paths with a view to redesigning one’s future.  Echoing back to Nietzsche’s ideas, de Beauvoir affirms that one is not made but is actively in the process of becoming.  In particular, she encourages women to realize that society has historically consigned them to passive acceptance of their roles, but now everyone should become aware of their options in life.