The Historical Roots of Existentialism: A Response to Modern Crises

Philosophy rarely emerges in a vacuum. It grows out of crisis – out of moments when the old answers stop working and people are forced to ask entirely new questions. Existentialism is perhaps the clearest example of this. It did not arise as a purely academic exercise but as a direct philosophical response to the seismic disruptions of the 19th and 20th centuries: the collapse of religious certainty, the alienating force of industrialization, and the terrifying discoveries of modern science. Understanding where existentialism comes from is essential to understanding what it is actually saying – and why those ideas still resonate today.

What is existentialism, in broad terms? 🔗

Existentialism is a family of philosophical views centered on the human individual’s struggle to lead an authentic, meaningful life in a world that offers no ready-made purpose. Unlike philosophical traditions that define human beings in relation to God, nature, or reason, existentialism insists that each person must confront existence directly – with all of its uncertainty, freedom, and anxiety. The term itself was first introduced by Gabriel Marcel in 1943, though the ideas it names had been building for over a century. It is not a single, unified school of thought. Only Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir explicitly called themselves “existentialists.” Yet a set of overlapping concerns – about anxiety, authenticity, freedom, and the absence of inherent meaning – binds its major thinkers together.

The philosophical backdrop: reason, idealism, and their discontents 🔗

To understand existentialism’s rise, it helps to know what it was pushing back against. The 17th and 18th century Enlightenment had placed enormous confidence in reason as the guide to truth, morality, and human progress. Philosophers like Spinoza, Leibniz, and Voltaire argued that reason alone could solve humanity’s deepest problems. Following this, German Idealism – particularly the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel – attempted to reconcile individual consciousness with historical and rational development. Hegel’s system was grand and all-encompassing: it sought to show how reality, freedom, and spirit unfold through history in an orderly dialectical process.

It was precisely this rationalist confidence that the early existentialists found insufficient. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), widely regarded as the first existentialist philosopher, launched a direct assault on Hegel’s system. For Kierkegaard, abstract rational systems could not capture the lived reality of individual human existence. Truth, he insisted, is not something you discover objectively – it is something you inhabit subjectively, through passionate personal commitment. Hegel’s philosophy could explain history and consciousness in the abstract, but it left the single, struggling individual without guidance on how to actually live. Kierkegaard stressed subjective truth over objective truth because how one acts, from an ethical perspective, is far more important than any detached matter of fact.

The decline of religious authority 🔗

At the heart of existentialism’s emergence is a profound religious crisis. For centuries, Christianity had provided Europeans with a coherent framework for understanding existence: the universe was purposefully created, human life had divine meaning, and moral values were grounded in God’s authority. By the 19th century, this framework was crumbling under multiple pressures – the rise of secular political thought, the spread of scientific rationalism, and growing disillusionment with institutional religion itself.

Kierkegaard saw this crisis from within his faith. He criticized the Church of Denmark for reducing Christianity to a social habit rather than a living, personal commitment. He feared that in modern consumer society, the individual was being absorbed into the crowd – spiritually smothered by communal and institutional illusions. Real faith, for him, required an individual “leap” beyond rational justification, a deeply personal relationship with God that no institution could mediate or replace.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) diagnosed the same crisis but drew a radically different conclusion. His famous declaration that “God is dead” was not a triumphant atheist proclamation – it was a warning. This phrase signified the decline of traditional religious belief due to the rise of science, secularism, and rational inquiry. For Nietzsche, the death of God meant the collapse of an entire moral order. Without a divine foundation, traditional values lost their grounding, and humanity was left facing an existential void. The rise of nihilism – the recognition that existence has no overarching purpose, reason, or order – became the defining spiritual crisis of modernity, and it was against this background that the urgent question of what it means to exist gained its force.

The two thinkers responded to this shared crisis in opposite ways. Kierkegaard responded with a focus on faith and a personal relationship with God as the ultimate source of meaning, while Nietzsche advocated for self-overcoming and the individual creation of values in a world without God. Their divergence was fundamental – but both confirmed that the old religious answers were no longer sufficient for the modern individual.

Science, industrialization, and the experience of alienation 🔗

The religious crisis did not arrive alone. It was deeply intertwined with the transformation of European society by science and industrial capitalism.

The challenge of modern science 🔗

Darwin’s theory of evolution and the advances of Newtonian physics offered explanations for natural phenomena that required no divine intervention. The rise of modern science presented a cold, mechanistic view of the world as a value-free aggregate of objects in causal interaction. The universe, once seen as a purposefully designed creation with humanity at its center, was now revealed as an indifferent expanse governed by natural laws. Human beings, far from being the crown of divine creation, were products of blind evolutionary processes – subject to chance, environment, and biological drives.

This shift produced what existentialists would call existential anxiety: a deeply felt awareness that the universe offers no pre-given meaning or purpose. The comforting idea that life had a divinely ordained direction was replaced by the stark recognition that meaning, if it exists at all, must be made by human beings themselves.

The Industrial Revolution and social fragmentation 🔗

Alongside the scientific revolution came the Industrial Revolution, which began reshaping European life in the late 18th century. The Industrial Revolution altered society in profound ways – from automation to urbanization – removing people from small, tight-knit communities with deep familial roots and transporting them into large, impersonal cities.

The rise of Protestantism also contributed to this social fragmentation. Its rejection of hierarchical Church authority emphasized individual inwardness and self-reliance, which created conditions for individualism but also eroded the sense of communal belonging that traditional society had provided. The result was a growing experience of loneliness and the perception of public life as fundamentally inauthentic.

In factories and industrial workplaces, individuals became interchangeable units in an economic machine. The specialization of both manual and intellectual labor that industrialization required meant that people were reduced to narrow functions rather than whole, self-directed persons. This experience of dehumanization – of being a means rather than an end – fed directly into existentialism’s core preoccupations. Several existentialists, including Heidegger, Arendt, and Marcel, saw this economic reduction of human life as a narrowing of the possibilities of genuine human existence.

The experience of nothingness and finitude 🔗

As religious certainty faded and modern life grew more fragmented and impersonal, a distinctive philosophical experience came to the fore: what existentialists call nothingness. This is not simply an abstract concept. It refers to the lived, emotional recognition that the world offers no inherent meaning, that human existence is not anchored in any eternal purpose, and that each individual must face this void directly.

Closely linked to nothingness is the confrontation with finitude – the awareness that human life is limited and temporary. What makes this existentially significant is not simply that death exists, but that the awareness of death forces a reckoning with the question of how to live. Modern science and medicine extended lifespans, but they did not resolve the underlying confrontation with mortality. Instead, they transformed it into something more abstract yet inescapable. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, acknowledging one’s facticity – the given constraints of embodiment, social context, and mortality – does not negate freedom. What distinguishes human beings is the capacity to rise above these facts, to interpret them, and to give them meaning.

This interplay between nothingness and finitude is not a counsel of despair for the existentialists. It is an invitation. When external sources of meaning – God, tradition, social roles – can no longer be relied upon, the individual is thrown back upon themselves. The burden of creating meaning becomes unavoidable, and in that burden lies both the terror and the possibility of authentic existence.

The 20th century and the crystallization of existentialism 🔗

The historical conditions of the 20th century turned these philosophical currents into a full-blown movement. As an intellectual movement that exploded onto the scene in mid-20th-century France, existentialism emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – events that forced an entire generation to confront death, freedom, and meaninglessness.

Existentialism reached the height of its popularity in France during World War II. The oppressive political climate of Nazi occupation and the need for underground resistance provided exactly the conditions under which existentialism’s insistence on individual action and responsibility found its most urgent expression. The writers and philosophers who gathered in Parisian cafés – Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus – were not just making abstract arguments. They were responding to the collapse of political order, the failure of collective ideologies, and the raw experience of human vulnerability.

The movement that had its roots in Kierkegaard’s critique of bourgeois Christianity and Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God had now found the historical moment that made its questions undeniable. The world wars shattered many longstanding beliefs about progress and the human condition. The mechanization of violence and the moral void left by widespread destruction led to a heightened focus on personal agency in an apparently chaotic and indifferent universe.

Key thinkers who shaped the movement 🔗

Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote bestselling novels, plays, and philosophical essays. Sartre’s formulation that “existence precedes essence” – that human beings are not born with a fixed nature or purpose but must create themselves through choices – became the defining slogan of secular existentialism. Simone de Beauvoir applied existentialist principles to feminism, exploring how social conditions constrain authentic self-creation. Martin Heidegger, though he rejected the label, contributed profoundly through his analysis of “Being” and the centrality of death and anxiety to human existence. And Albert Camus, while distancing himself from existentialism proper, explored the related concept of the absurd – the collision between humanity’s desire for meaning and the universe’s silence.

In literature, existentialist themes appeared in the work of Franz Kafka, whose novel The Trial depicts a man trapped in an incomprehensible system that denies him any stable identity, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which captures the human experience of waiting for a meaning that never arrives. These literary works did not just illustrate existential philosophy – they brought it to life for readers who had never opened a philosophy text.

Why the historical background matters 🔗

Existentialism is sometimes taught as a set of abstract doctrines about freedom, authenticity, and the absurd. But stripped of its historical roots, it loses much of its force. The 20th century saw existentialism emerge as a defined and influential philosophical movement – no longer just a collection of ideas, but a response to the growing uncertainties of modern life: two world wars, the rise of totalitarianism, and the rapid development of technology.

The movement arose because real historical conditions – the death of God, the rise of impersonal industrial capitalism, the revelations of modern science, and the horror of modern warfare – created a genuine philosophical emergency. The old frameworks for making sense of human existence had broken down, and existentialism arose to ask the question that could no longer be avoided: given that the universe offers no guaranteed meaning, how should a human being live?

That question was not invented by philosophers. It was forced upon them – and upon everyone – by history itself.

What do you think? If the religious and philosophical certainties of earlier centuries had not collapsed, would existentialism have ever emerged – or do you think the questions it raises are so fundamental to human experience that they would have surfaced regardless? And in an age of artificial intelligence, climate anxiety, and digital alienation, does existentialism’s diagnosis of modernity feel more relevant than ever, or has the context changed too radically for its answers to still apply?

References

1. https://iep.utm.edu/existent/
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard
4. https://eternalisedofficial.com/2021/01/08/kierkegaard-and-nietzsche/
5. https://www.studocu.com/en-us/document/harvard-university/philosophies-and-theories/kierkegaard-and-nietzsche-existentialism-and-the-nature-of-faith/149700037
6. https://capitalideasonline.com/wordpress/nietzsche-kierkegaard-and-the-bhagavad-gita/
7. https://www.tameri.com/exist/intro/history/
8. https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy/philosophy-terms-and-concepts/existentialism
9. https://philosophiesoflife.org/existentialism/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
11. https://maycontainphilosophy.com/origin-of-existentialism/