Existentialists
Philosophy had spent two thousand years asking what things essentially are: what is justice, what is the good, what is a human being in general. By the middle of the nineteenth century that question had been answered as completely as it ever would be, in Hegel's vast System that fit all of reality, history, and humanity into one developing rational whole. And then a few writers noticed that the System, for all its completeness, had no room for the one thing each of them actually was: a particular person, alive now, afraid, having to choose, with no proof to lean on and no second life to get it right in. A Danish religious writer, a German philosopher with a hammer, and a Russian novelist of the cellar each, separately, turned philosophy around to start from there, from the concrete existing individual rather than the universal essence. None of them used the word existentialism; the word and the organized movement came later, in the twentieth century, when Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir built a whole philosophy on the ground these three had broken. This is the story of that ground: the stuck question they all answered, the answers themselves, and the shared preoccupation, with existence, freedom, anxiety, and meaning in a universe that no longer hands them over, that holds the otherwise wildly different thinkers together under one retrospective name.
