Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre are arguably the three most formative existentialist philosophers. Kierkegaard wrote roughly a century before his counterparts, and is widely regarded as being the father of existentialism. All three philosophers changed and shape the philosophy permanently and in their own distinct ways.
Existentialism
At its simplest definition, existentialism is a philosophy with the thinking, feeling and acting human being at its core. Free will is an essential component of existentialism. The most basic tenet of the philosophy is that existence precedes essence; that is, an individual exists as a human being before they have any essence as an individual.
The philosophy focuses heavily on the concepts of existence as a concrete concept, the idea of radical, individual freedom that is solely one’s own and the recognition of one’s mortality. Existentialism also branches into the absurd, with Albert Camus, and to some extent nihilism, with Frederich Nietzsche.
Soren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Although he suffered from melancholy throughout most of his life –a melancholy that drove him to break off his engagement –Kierkegaard wrote with clarity and passion about the need to ground the self within the world and explore doubts about God and the subjectivity of existence.
Fear and Trembling
One of his most famous works is the book Fear and Trembling, which deals with concepts like angst and the challenges of being an authentic, religious human being.
Kierkegaard’s body of work set the stage for the further development of the existential sentiment that flows throughout it, and his writing undeniably shaped those who came after him, although their own impressions differed.
Martin Heidegger
Although associated with Nazism, Heidegger denied that he supported the actions of the Nazi party and eventually stepped down from his position as rector of the University of Freiburg. Far more important to existentialism than Heidegger’s politics, however, was his contribution to the philosophy, mainly in the form of Being and Time.
Being and Time
Being and Time deals with the question of what it means to “be” a human, what it means to exist. The hefty, complex philosophical work attempts to offer a satisfactory definition of the state and quality of being-there, or existing within the time frame of one’s birth, the quality of man’s authenticity and the awareness of one’s own existence.
Through Being and Time, Heidegger developed the idea of angst in relationship to one’s mortality and the ultimate responsibility one has to his own being. Being and Time also deals with the idea of each person having been “thrown” into their own existence and the ways in which time, place and possibilities influence authentic ways of living.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre is perhaps the most commonly discussed existentialist. Writing after World War II, Sartre’s atheistic existentialism was very similar to that of Heidegger’s. Both men, like Kierkegaard before them, sought to find and explain what it meant to live as an authentic being, but unlike Kierkegaard, both rejected religion.
Sartre rejected the existence of a god largely because of his experiences during WWII, although his logical writings on the subject were not bereft of any intellectual support. A novelist, playwright and political activist, Sartre’s writing affected many through its sheer energy.
Sartre’s Existentialism
The basis of his existentialist thought came in the form of The Transcendence of the Ego, in which he developed the idea of the pre-reflective consciousness of a being-in-itself. To Sartre, a thing-in-itself (man) was a limitless well of potential, and each individual had the responsibility –and the burden –of freedom. As Sartre said, humans are “doomed to be free,” and must come to terms with that sentence. (Source: Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre)
Philosophy of Responsibility
Existentialism is, largely, a philosophy that speaks to each individual about his own mortality, his own radical freedom and his responsibility to bear out that freedom within the life he has to live. Each of the main existential philosophers dealt with the idea of being and freedom in his own way, but each also left an enormous body of work behind to be examined.
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