DE Weekly: The History, Development, and Precursors of Existentialism
Below is an archived email originally sent on October 5, 2026.
The History, Development, and Precursors of Existentialism
While it is true that Existentialism arguably did not cement itself as a real, solidified philosophy until the twentieth century, its core tenets were explored and espoused over the centuries preceding the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who organized it into a cohesive school of thought.
I have written about how certain ideas we would today call “existentialist” in nature can be found as far back as Aristotle’s time, can be gleaned from theologians such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and were present in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others.
The question I’ll be exploring today is: are we able to trace the history, development, and precursors of Existentialism up to its heyday in the mid-twentieth century?
To do that, I believe it best to start with Augustine (one of my favorites), who, in the fourth century, penned his Confessions, a biography that not only touches on his faith conversion, but explores some of the most pervasive questions of life, existence, and meaning, all of which are at the heart of Existentialism.
In Confessions, Augustine argued that the power that God possessed at the beginning was so absolute that His own wisdom was enough for the act of creation, no pre-existing materials or building blocks required.
In fact, before the creation, there was even no time, as we understand it––there was nothing. And so, all of creation, Augustine deduces, really did come ex nihilo: out of nothing.
This is an idea that would contribute to Sartre’s notion that existence precedes essence, that we are born into existence and must create a life of meaning from the ground up.
Another religion-minded philosopher whose ideas can be compared to those of the existentialists was Blaise Pascal, the mid-seventeenth century philosopher whose Pensées birthed a philosophical argument we call Pascal’s wager.
Pascal’s wager is an argument that posits as humans, we engage in a gamble regarding the existence of God and our belief in God, a gamble that ultimately defines our life and our fate.
Pascal contends through logical reasoning that, if we are rational beings, we will live according to the fact that God exists, and we believe in him.
This is an existential gamble for Pascal, and one that we must answer: does God exist or not? If he does not, then we lose nothing either way. If he does, however, we stand to gain or lose everything.
Since the potential gain from belief is infinite and the potential loss from belief is merely finite, Pascal argued, the rational choice is to believe in God.
Fast forward to the 1800s, and we have yet another Christian philosopher in Kierkegaard who, through his “Leap of Faith” idea, expounded on the ideas set forth by Pascal in his wager.
Since Kierkegaard (considered by some to be the first existentialist philosopher), all authors associated with existentialism have focused on largely the same ideas and problems.
Existentialism focuses on our total, radical freedom in this world; we are thrown into the world and forced to make meaningful choices without a clear idea of the answers to our questions.
Our human condition is one of uncertainty: that our existence might be meaningless, the existentialists argue, is absurd and necessitates responsibility for one’s choices. Every choice we make in such an existence truly matters.
In keeping with that theme, Kierkegaard argued that it is futile to rely only on objectivity and systematic reasoning about the world, as we are prone to miss the reality of what human life is really about in the process.
We are instead to emphasize each of our own individual choices to combat our predicament in our search for meaning, and it is only here that we can feel a sense of meaning and purpose.
You have probably drawn some parallels between the philosophers I have mentioned so far and what we’ve come to think of as existentialist ideas today.
This is because all the questions that have been asked over the course of history, whether with a religious intonation or not, whether exploring meaning or existence or purpose or anything else, are existential questions in nature.
In other words, if it has to do with our existence, it has to do with Existentialism.
Now that we find ourselves here, when did Existentialism come into its own as a robust realm of philosophical thought?
Following the first and second world wars, old ideas about humanity were shed for new ones, as the devastation that was witnessed “rewired” the brains of people and changed the focus of questioning to other places.
It was Gabriel Marcel who coined the term “Existentialism” in the 1940s, applying it as a term to people like Sartre, who initially rejected the term but came to embrace it later on.
Sartre, who studied the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger voraciously, is the most common figure associated with Existentialism’s emergence and its cementing as a philosophy.
It was Heidegger himself, in fact, who read Sartre’s work and remarked, “Here for the first time I encountered an independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out of which I think.”
The cultural impact of Existentialism on pop culture since World War II, including inspiring swathes of postmodern thought, political activism, contemporary and modern art and cinema, cannot be contained in one newsletter.
It was a long and winding road to get there, but Existentialism came about. And, here I am, writing about it today.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
It’s hard to compress such a long history into so short a body of text and make it as cohesive as I would like. Perhaps I will have to dedicate some more writing to this endeavor at some point. But, hopefully you are able to see the through line I tried to illumine today.
For more content, follow @TheDailyExist on X. For other social links, click here.
I write this newsletter for free–I love sharing my thoughts with you all, and I’ll continue to do so for free. But if you like what I write and want to show your support, you can always click here to share a tip. Thanks for keeping me going–it’s much appreciated.