The 20th century philosophical tradition that emphasizes human freedom, individual responsibility, and the creation of meaning in a universe that does not provide it from outside. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are the 19th century forerunners; Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir developed existentialism into a major postwar movement. Almost every existentialist thinker worked in Nietzsche's shadow, particularly his analysis of the death of God and the consequent need for human beings to create their own values rather than receiving them from tradition.
Tradition
Existentialism
The philosophical tradition that emphasizes human freedom, individual responsibility, and the creation of meaning in a universe that does not provide it.
Thinkers
Thinker
Friedrich Nietzsche
1844–1900
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher hostile to democracy, socialism, and nationalism alike, whose attack on Christian morality reshaped the political imagination of the 20th century in ways he never intended
ThinkerHenry David Thoreau
1817–1862
Henry David Thoreau was an American transcendentalist and abolitionist whose Civil Disobedience (1849) founded the modern doctrine of principled resistance and shaped every later tradition of nonviolent political action
ThinkerMartin Heidegger
1889–1976
Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and most troubling philosophers of the 20th century, whose Being and Time reshaped philosophy and who was also a committed Nazi who never meaningfully repudiated his role
ThinkerSimone de Beauvoir
1908–1986
Simone de Beauvoir was the French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) founded modern feminist theory, grounding women's liberation in the freedom to become rather than be
ThinkerAlbert Camus
1913–1960
Albert Camus was a French-Algerian moralist of reform over revolution who refused every ideological excuse for murder, at the cost of his standing with the Parisian left that had made him famous
ThinkerSøren Kierkegaard
1813–1855
Søren Kierkegaard was the father of existentialism, whose attack on Hegelian system-building and the complacency of state Christianity reshaped 20th-century philosophy, theology, and political thought
ThinkerMax Stirner
1806–1856
Max Stirner was a German egoist philosopher whose dissolution of every fixed idea into 'spooks' made him a wellspring for anarcho-individualism, Nietzsche, and radical libertarian thought
ThinkerFyodor Dostoevsky
1821–1881
Fyodor Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian conservative novelist — transformed by Siberian imprisonment from socialist radical — whose great novels prophesied where revolutionary nihilism would lead
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