Existentialism is a philosophical movement which posits that individual
human beings create the meaning and essence
of their lives. It emerged
as a movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, though it
had forerunners in earlier centuries.
Existentialism generally
postulates that the absence of a transcendent force (such as God) means
that the individual is entirely free, and, therefore, ultimately
responsible. (Nevertheless, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky were
Christians.) It is up to humans to create an ethos of personal
responsibility outside of any branded belief system. That personal
articulation of being is the only way to rise above humanity''s absurd
condition (suffering and death, and the finality of the individual).Existentialism
is a reaction against
traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and
empiricism, seeking to discover an ultimate order in metaphysical
principles or in the structure of the observed world, and therefore
universal meaning. As a philosophic movement, existentialism''s origins
are heavily accredited to the nineteenth-century philosophers
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and existentialism was prevalent in
Continental philosophy. Literary writers such as Dostoevsky also
contributed to the movement.In the 1940s and 1950s, French
existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de
Beauvoir, wrote scholarly and fictional works that popularized
existential themes such as "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd,
freedom, commitment, and nothingness".Walter Kaufmann described
Existentialism as, "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the
repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and
especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional
philosophy as superficial