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Learn Existentialism

Freedom, anxiety and meaning from Kierkegaard to Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus.

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Existentialism is a family of philosophical ideas centered on the individual's concrete existence: freedom, choice, anxiety, responsibility and the search for meaning when no answers are handed to us in advance. Its roots lie in Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1800s, and it flourished in mid twentieth-century France with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, drawing heavily on Martin Heidegger. Several of these thinkers rejected the label, so learning their differences is part of the subject. Literature matters too, from Dostoevsky to Camus's novels. Learnr builds short lessons that pair key concepts with passages and discussion questions.

How to learn Existentialism, step by step

Start with Sartre's short lecture. Existentialism Is a Humanism, a 1945 lecture, is brief and lays out existence preceding essence, radical freedom and responsibility. Sartre later had reservations about it, but it remains the most accessible way in.
Go back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Read selections from Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling on faith and choice, and Nietzsche's parable of the madman announcing that God is dead in The Gay Science. They frame the problems later existentialists answer in different ways.
Learn the core concepts with examples. Sartre's waiter who plays at being a waiter illustrates bad faith, and Heidegger's idea of das Man describes living as anyone does. Apply each concept to an everyday situation of your own to check you understand it.
Give Beauvoir her own place. Read The Ethics of Ambiguity for an existentialist ethics and selections from The Second Sex, which argues that one is not born a woman but becomes one. She was an original philosopher, not only Sartre's companion.
Read Camus on the absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus asks whether life is worth living without inherent meaning and ends with Sisyphus imagined as happy. Pair it with The Stranger, and note that Camus rejected the existentialist label himself.
Discuss and review the ideas regularly. These thinkers use specialized terms that blur together. Short Learnr lessons with concept-matching and scenario questions keep Sartre's, Heidegger's and Camus's vocabularies distinct.

What you'll learn

Explain Sartre's claim that existence precedes essence
Describe key concepts such as anxiety, bad faith, authenticity and the absurd
Compare religious and atheistic existentialism, from Kierkegaard to Sartre
Explain how Beauvoir applied existentialist ideas to ethics and the situation of women
Distinguish existentialism from nihilism and from Camus's absurdism

What's inside your Existentialism course

A sample path Learnr builds for Existentialism. Your real course adapts to your goal and level.

1. Kierkegaard: faith, choice and anxiety
2. Nietzsche and the death of God
3. Heidegger, being and authenticity
4. Sartre: freedom, bad faith and responsibility
5. Beauvoir: ambiguity, ethics and The Second Sex
6. Camus, the absurd and existentialist literature

How long does it take to learn Existentialism?

Expect about 4 to 8 weeks at 2 to 4 hours a week to understand the main figures and concepts through short works and selections. Reading major books such as Being and Time or Being and Nothingness in full takes months.

What you need before you start

No formal background required. An introduction to philosophy helps, and patience with dense texts matters more than prior knowledge.

Common mistakes to avoid

Equating existentialism with nihilism or despair. Most existentialists argued that freedom and responsibility let us create meaning.
Starting with Being and Time or Being and Nothingness. Begin with lectures, essays and novels, then move to the major treatises.
Treating all existentialists as holding one doctrine. Kierkegaard was a Christian, Sartre an atheist, and Camus and Heidegger rejected the label.

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Existentialism questions, answered

What does existence precedes essence mean?

It is Sartre's claim that humans have no fixed nature or purpose given in advance. We first exist, then define ourselves through our choices and actions, so we are responsible for what we become.

Was Camus an existentialist?

He is often grouped with the existentialists, but Camus rejected the label. He described his own position in terms of the absurd, the clash between our demand for meaning and a silent universe.

Who was the first existentialist?

Soren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, is usually called the father of existentialism, though the term itself only became common in the 1940s.