Where it sits
A movement named from outside, whose members mostly declined the membership.
Tell it apart
| Aspect | Existentialism | Nihilism |
|---|---|---|
| Premise | No given meaning | No given meaning |
| Conclusion | You're responsible | Nothing is warranted |
| Freedom is | A burden | Irrelevant |
| Has an ethics | Yes | No |
Existentialism starts where nihilism arrives — no given essence, no handed-down meaning — and then treats that as the beginning of obligation rather than the end of it. Same premise, opposite conclusion, which is why the two are constantly confused and never interchangeable.
What it doesn't mean
Most refused the name. Only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly embraced it; Heidegger repudiated the association in 1947; Camus told an interviewer in 1945 'Non, je ne suis pas existentialiste'; and Sartre himself, when the label was first applied to him, said 'My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don't even know what Existentialism is' The label was applied from outside and mostly resisted from inside.
It's closer to the opposite: a coherent account of ethical responsibility grounded in freedom. 'Existence precedes essence' is a claim about the order of self-definition, and its immediate consequence is liability. Bad faith is the name for pretending you're a fixed object with no choices — treated as a moral failure, not a mood.
What it really means
Existentialism is a movement whose members mostly declined to be in it.
The term was introduced by Gabriel Marcel in 1943, and he applied it to people who hadn't asked. Heidegger repudiated the association in his 1947 Letter on Humanism. Camus told an interviewer in 1945, flatly: Non, je ne suis pas existentialiste. Only Sartre and Beauvoir ever embraced it — and Sartre, when Marcel first pinned the label on him, answered My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don't even know what Existentialism is. It's a label applied from outside and resisted from inside, which makes the tidy movement in the textbooks a slightly retrospective invention.
What holds it together is one formula, from Sartre's 1945 lecture: existence precedes essence. A paper-knife has an essence before it exists — someone designed it for cutting, and that spec explains it. A person doesn't. You turn up, in Sartre's phrasing, appear on the scene, and only afterwards define yourself by what you do.
And the popular reading of that as elegant despair gets it backwards. If no nature was issued to you, nobody else authored what you've become — which is not a relief. Bad faith is the term for the escape route: pretending you're a fixed object with no choices, that this is simply how you are. The tradition treats that as a moral failure rather than a mood.
Freedom, here, is the bill rather than the prize.
For the core ideas, Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity and what it means to make a meaning rather than find one, read existentialism explained in the Philosophy world.
Where it comes from
Latin — out
Latin — to take a stand, cause to stand
The buried image is standing-forth — appearing on the scene — which is precisely Sartre's gloss: man exists, turns up, appears, and only afterwards defines himself.
- 1943
Gabriel Marcel introduces the term 'existentialism' — and notably applies it to people who had not chosen it.
- 1945
Sartre delivers the lecture 'Existentialism is a Humanism' in Paris, popularising the label and the formula 'existence precedes essence'.
In real life
- Offered the safe career his parents chose, he realises nothing in his nature obliges him to take it — and that whichever way he goes, the choice is his to answer for.
- In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre describes a café waiter acting out his role so completely that he pretends he has no choice — his example of bad faith.
- Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Second Sex (1949), that one becomes a woman rather than being born one, applies the same idea to gender.
Questions
Q01What does 'existence precedes essence' mean?
Sartre's formula means you exist first and acquire a nature afterwards, through what you do. He glossed it as: man 'exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself'. It inverts the classical picture in which a thing's essence — its design spec — precedes and explains its existence.
Q02Was Camus an existentialist?
He denied it repeatedly. In a 1945 interview he said flatly 'Non, je ne suis pas existentialiste', and he's routinely listed among those who distanced themselves from the label. He also rejected the existentialist claim that existence precedes essence, holding instead that there is a common human nature.
Q03Is existentialism the same as nihilism?
No. Existentialism offers an account of ethical responsibility grounded in freedom — it accepts that no meaning is issued to you, then argues this makes you responsible for what you make. Nihilism draws no such conclusion. Existentialism's entire content is the conclusion nihilism refuses to draw.
Sources
- Existentialism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Existentialism — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ex- (etymology) — Wiktionary.