Existentialism is often taken to be more a style of life than a philosophy, and, having gone out of fashion like all styles do, is now best recalled in nostalgia, like film noir.1
Sometimes my students wonder why they should care about existentialism when even its most prominent philosophers rejected it.
Heidegger, Camus, and even Sartre (at one point) denied they were existentialists. This makes it seem like existentialism is dated and obsolete. And it’s true–in certain ways, existentialism didn’t live up to its promise.
But in its truest sense, existentialism is not a dead tradition but a living idea that can help us discover ourselves and tell our own stories.
Why did Sartre Reject the Existentialist Label?
Many don’t realize that Sartre initially rejected the label during his most ‘existentialist’ phase.
Even before he ‘abandoned’ his existential philosophy for Marxism, Sartre had a rocky relationship with the term existentialism. His hesitance shows us that the term itself has a complicated history and that we should be careful about what we mean when we use it.
Sartre himself didn’t invent the term: the French Christian existentialist, Gabriel Marcel, first used it in a 1945 review of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. But the term stuck, and existentialism became all the rage amongst the general public in France (and beyond).
When people would see Sartre in the cafes and streets of Paris, they’d ask him, “What is existentialism?”
Sartre would respond, “Existentialism? I do not know what that is. My philosophy is a philosophy of existence and it comes from a very complicated German philosophy, which is phenomenology.”2
Sartre was not rejecting his own work but its popular reception. He was trying to maintain some professional distance from the crowd’s watered-down version of his philosophy.
By the time of the public delivery of the famous lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism,” he had embraced the title. But this should not make us forget that by distancing himself from its public reception, Sartre was the first to anticipate the distinction between cultural existentialism (e.g., cigarettes, coffee shops, jazz, and black turtlenecks) and philosophical existentialism.
There is, of course, a sense in which existentialism is outmoded, and we must draw a distinction here between the philosophical existentialism we defend and encourage, and the cultural existentialism that was distinctively a phenomenon of the mid-twentieth century.3
Turtlenecks may go in and out of style, but philosophical existentialism’s promise will endure.
Why did Heidegger Reject the Existentialist Label?
Heidegger granted that existentialism was a good name for a philosophy where, as Sartre wrote, “existence precedes essence.”4
Yet Heidegger famously rejected the label for his own position in Being and Time:
But the basic tenet of “existentialism” has nothing at all in common with the statement from Being and Time.5
Still, most scholars today would call Being and Time one of the most important existentialist works. This shows us that we should be careful to distinguish between Sartre’s brand of philosophical existentialism and existentialism as a larger philosophical movement.
Existentialism has both a narrower and broader philosophical reference.
- Existentialism in the Narrow Sense: a post-World War II movement in French philosophy led by Jean-Paul Sartre.
- Existentialism in the Broader Sense: an umbrella term for a larger movement of Continental European philosophy that ran from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s and which focused on individual existence as its central concept.
When Heidegger rejected the existentialism label, he was rejecting its narrow sense and Sartre’s existentialism as an adequate statement for his own position.
Why did Camus Reject Existentialism?
In a 1945 interview, Camus said:
No, I am not an existentialist […] and the one philosophical book I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was written against philosophers called existentialists….6
Yet, as with Heidegger, most academics today consider Camus to be an important existentialist.
The back cover of the Vintage paperback edition of The Myth of Sisyphus reads “a crucial exposition of existentialist thought.” And on amazon.com the book is currently the #1 Bestseller in the category of Existential Philosophy.
This shows us that existentialism in the broadest sense can be broken down into two other branches: meaning-centric existentialism and absurdist existentialism.
Camus’ absurdism was a form of existentialism, but existentialism in a different register. Unlike other existentialists, in the face of the breakdown of traditional Western worldviews (e.g., religion), Camus did not direct his readers to find this-worldly meaning and purpose. Instead, he asked them to affirm life by finding a passion for the sensuousness of lived existence. But Camus was still an existentialist, because his absurdism still affirmed existence against nihilism and despair.
When Camus rejected the existentialist label, he was rejecting the prioritization of the search for meaning and purpose predominant in most other forms of existential thought.
New Existentialism: Reviving the Promise of Existentialism
When Camus, Heidegger, and Sartre rejected the existentialist label, they each had a more limited sense of the term in mind than the term in general use today.
Most, nowadays, use the term in a broader sense to describe a widespread philosophical movement in European thought that included all three of these thinkers.
This is not to say that existentialism did not have any shortcomings. Both Heidegger and Sartre eventually gave up their early existential projects. And by the 1960s, other philosophical movements (e.g., structuralism and post-structuralism) had overtaken existentialism in terms of academic importance. Returning to existentialism today should be about shedding its weaknesses while recovering its original promise.
So I tell my students it’s important to learn about existentialism because of the promise it still holds for us today. No other philosophical movement foregrounds individual existence and experience to the extent it does. By learning about what went wrong with existentialism, we can correct these issues and develop a new existentialist way to think about our own lives and stories.
Existentialism is not a dead tradition, but a living promise we can call new existentialism.
- Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life, Oxford University Press, 2021. ↩︎
- Annie Cohen-Solal, at the 23:00 minute mark in “Jean-Paul Sartre: The Road to Freedom” from BBC’s Human, All Too Human series. ↩︎
- Joseph, Reynolds, and Woodward, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Existentialism, 2011, p. 2. ↩︎
- Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in Existentialism is a Humanism, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 20. ↩︎
- Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 249. ↩︎
- Richard Raskin, “Camus’s Critique of Existentialism,” Minerva (5), 2021. ↩︎
