Existentialism is the philosophical tradition organized around the claim that existence precedes essence: human beings are not born with a fixed nature or purpose but constitute themselves through their choices, actions, and commitments in concrete situations. The tradition spans Søren Kierkegaard’s insistence on the individual’s confrontation with faith, Martin Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world, Jean-Paul Sartre’s radical freedom and responsibility, Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist feminism, and Albert Camus’s absurdism.
The existentialist confrontation with meaninglessness overlaps with but is distinct from nihilism. Nihilism diagnoses the absence of inherent meaning; existentialism responds by insisting that meaning is made, not found. Sartre’s formulation is the sharpest: humans are “condemned to be free” — there is no essence, no God, no human nature that determines what one should do, and this freedom is inescapable. The anxiety (Kierkegaard), nausea (Sartre), or thrownness (Heidegger) that accompanies this recognition is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be lived.
Existentialism’s political implications are contested. Sartre moved toward Marxism; Camus refused it. De Beauvoir demonstrated that existentialist analysis applies to the situation of women under patriarchy — “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The tradition’s emphasis on situated freedom, radical responsibility, and the refusal of bad faith (self-deception about one’s freedom) continues to inform political philosophy, though existentialism as a named movement is largely historical.