Existentialism Unpacked

From the opening pages

Existentialism is a philosophy about what it means to be a human being when no one has handed you a completed script, a guaranteed purpose, or a laminated chart titled “Correct Use of One Life.” It is concerned with freedom, responsibility, anxiety, death, meaning, and the small administrative problem that you must live your own life yourself. Other people will offer instructions, naturally. Parents, governments, churches, employers, influencers, therapists, dating coaches, dead philosophers, and strangers in comment sections all appear mysteriously confident about what you should do. Existentialism begins by asking whether any of them can actually live for you. The answer, inconveniently, is no.

The word “existentialism” became famous in the twentieth century, especially around Jean-Paul Sartre and postwar Paris, but the problems it names are older than the label. Human beings had been panicking about freedom long before anyone sat in a café with a cigarette and made it sound professional. Søren Kierkegaard, writing in Copenhagen in the 1840s, is often treated as one of the major ancestors of existentialism. In Either/Or, published in 1843, and The Concept of Anxiety, published in 1844, he explored choice, despair, faith, and the strange dizziness that comes from realizing that one can become more than one thing. A cow does not usually pause in a field and wonder whether it has chosen an inauthentic career path. Humans do. This is one of our gifts, apparently.

Kierkegaard was a Christian thinker, which already complicates the lazy idea that existentialism is simply atheism wearing a black coat. He believed that the individual stands alone before God, not safely hidden inside public opinion, social respectability, or “what everyone does.” For him, faith was not a pleasant family tradition or a vague optimism about the universe being basically nice. It was a difficult inward commitment made under conditions of uncertainty. That matters because existentialism, from the beginning, was not just about what people believe in theory. It was about how a person exists, chooses, trembles, avoids, commits, and becomes someone. Philosophy, in this tradition, is not merely a clever thing to say after dinner. It is a question of whether your life is actually yours.