Sartre first rejected the existentialist label, then made it famous
Gabriel Marcel, a French Catholic philosopher, pinned the word existentialism on Jean-Paul Sartre at a 1945 colloquium, and Sartre refused it. Weeks later, on 29 October 1945, he embraced it in a Paris lecture that became the short book Existentialism Is a Humanism. Marcel eventually dropped the label himself.
Existentialism is less a doctrine than a family of views about how an individual can live authentically in a world that looks absurd or incomprehensible. Themes of angst, courage, freedom and existential crisis run through it. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and the novelist Dostoevsky are now counted as 19th-century forerunners because they attacked rationalism and wrestled with meaning, though the name only arrived in the mid 20th century, applied to many thinkers after their deaths.
The key slogan, as Frederick Copleston put it summarising Sartre, is that existence precedes essence. People are not born with a fixed nature; they define themselves through what they do. Sartre described humans as first existing, encountering themselves and surging up in the world before defining themselves. That is not permission to be anything one fancies. Pretending otherwise is what he called bad faith, since people are defined by their actions and answerable for them. It also means a cruel person can choose to become a good one.
Allies disagreed. Sartre held a radical view of freedom in which nothing fixes our purpose but our own choices. Simone de Beauvoir answered that habits and circumstances, which she grouped as sedimentation, resist changes of direction. Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time of 1927 underpinned Sartre's definition, suggested in his Letter on Humanism that Sartre had bent his ideas toward subjectivism.
The notion of the absurd adds that the world holds no meaning beyond what people give it, and no fairness either: misfortune can land on anyone at any time. Even the word existential has a disputed origin. Norwegian scholars argue Kierkegaard borrowed it from the poet Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven, with Fredrik Christian Sibbern said to have carried the idea between them in two conversations in 1841.
Source: Existentialism
