Existentialism, a philosophical movement that suggests that we are fundamentally human beings, individually, we create the
meaning and essence of our lives. It emerged as a movement in literature and philosophy of the twentieth century, heir to the arguments supported by some philosophers.
This movement generally described the presence of a transcendental force, meaning that the individual is free, and for that reason fully responsible for their deeds, without the influence of superior forces that could determine their ways. This gives humans the option of creating an ethic of individual responsibility, apart from any belief system external to him.
This premise is to be in the staff as the only way to overcome existing, generally, the influence of religions, dealing with the suffering, death and purpose of the individual as a form of control. Existentialism is born as a reaction to the philosophical traditions prevailing at the time, such as rationalism or empiricism, which sought to discover a lawful order of metaphysical principles within the structure of the world, where they can obtain the universal Meaning things.
In 1940 to 1950, French stocks made written academic and popular fiction that kind of existential themes of Liberty, Nada, Absurdo, describing the existentialism as a refusal to belong to any school of thought, to any repudiating the adequacy body belief, and especially systems, and a strong dissatisfaction toward the traditional philosophy, which was marked as superficial, academic and removed from reality. It is the philosophy of existence, the philosophical and humanistic European movement, identified by the notion that "the existence precedes essence and became popular after the social and moral crisis, as a result of the devastation and tragedies socio-philosophical occasioned by the great European wars of the twentieth century, especially the Second World War.
At existentialism has been attributed experiential nature, linked to the dilemmas, havoc, contradictions and human stupidity. This philosophical debate and propose solutions to the problems inherent in the most proper human condition, as the absurdity of life, the significance and insignificance of being, the dilemma of war, the eternal theme of time, liberty, whether physical or metaphysics, the God-man relationship, atheism, the nature of man, life and death.
Existentialism seeks to reveal what that surrounds the man, making a detailed description of the environment and abstract material in which it operates the individual, so that it obtains an understanding own and can give meaning or find a justification for its existence. This philosophy, despite the attacks coming with greater intensity of the Christian religion, looking for a justification for human existence. Existentialism, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, indicates that there is human nature.
The French philosopher said that the existence precedes essence, what in effect is an attack on religious belief, whose thinking began with Aristotle and culminated in Sartre, who pointed out that human beings exist first and then we acquired substance, ie only exist while we live and we learn from others who have invented human abstract things, from God to the existence of a prior human nature.
Existentialism most significant finds its antecedent in the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), known as the father of existentialism, who influenced the French philosopher Sartre. Since late in the twentieth century, this was developed philosophical (never in a systematic manner, although his popularity grew after the moral and ethical problems that resulted in the Second World War, apart from the fear caused by the atomic bomb) and finally fall within irrationalism of the so-called philosophical by novelists and thinkers of both renowned as the French Jean Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel, the Algerian Albert Camus and German Martin Heidegger. Albert Camus, existentialist, was devoted to demonstrate through his essays and novels the absurdities of the world.