Category:Existentialism: Difference between revisions

{{Useful Notes}}

{{quote|''"First of all man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterward, defines himself."''|Jean-Paul Sartre}}

{{quote|''"There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming."'' |Soren Kierkegaard, father of existentialism}}

Existentialism is [[Post Something Ism|the response]] to the soul-crushingly [[The Fatalist|fatalistic]], [[Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy]]-fostering [[Crapsack World|worldview]] of [[Nietzsche Wannabe|Nihilism]]. For an Existentialist, sure the "meaning of life" is brutally [[Deconstructed]] as not being able to exist objectively and [[Cosmic Horror Story|all our hopes are a cruel illusion]], we [[Humans Are Flawed]] and [[You Can't Fight Fate|there's nothing we can do about it]], but then again each individual has the choice to make the most meaningful out of each hour of our lives — those who choose to spend it being bored, or following others, or [[Wangst|wangsting]] endlessly are [[Silly Rabbit Cynicism Is for Losers|wasting it]].

Existentialism often advocates individuality and involves things like [[Be Yourself]], [[Desperately Looking for a Purpose In Life]], [[I Am What I Am]], living out your [[Goal in Life]], [[Earn Your Happy Ending]], and sometimes moments of [[You Are Not Alone]]. This gives a [[World of Cardboard Speech|world-of-cardboard]]/[[Patrick Stewart Speech]] to the nihilists and [[Reconstruction|reconstructs]] the "meaning in life" concept.

The term [[wikipedia:Existential angst#Angst|Existential]] [[Angst]] is even coined to describe the sudden feeling of [[Quicksand Box]] it gave them, especially if they had just abandoned the [[Freedom From Choice]] provided by both religion and social peer pressure.

Existentialist character types include [[The Anti-Nihilist]] and [[The Ubermensch]] (the extreme [[Blue and Orange Morality]] version). The [[Knight in Sour Armor]] or [[Determined Defeatist]] have some elements of this.

While existential motifs are [[Older Than You Think]], Søren Kierkegaard, [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] foreshadowed in the 19th century some of what would be the defining characteristics of the philosophy, although they didn't know each other and the philosophy was unnamed. The term "existentialism" seems to have been coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. It gained popularity in the early 1940s around the time of the Modernist movement (amidst scientific discoveries of large and downright weird things out there, which inspired [[Lovecraftian Fiction]], and of course the horrors of [[World War Two]]), when Jean-Paul Sartre [[Trope Codifier|codified]] existential philosophy with three words: "Existence precedes essence." It was the reverse of most previous philosophical thought, which held that the essence (soul, purpose, meaning) of a thing came first.

You'll find that many of the people held up as examples of existentialism indignantly claimed that they weren't -- probably a side-effect of the fact that noncomformity is one of the school's main tenets ("Once you label me, you negate me" is a famous line of Kierkegaard's).

[[The Other Wiki]] [[wikipedia:Existentialism|has an article and analysis on the subject.]] Related to [[Absurdism]], [[Post Modernism]], [[Romanticism]] and Individualism.

See [[Existentialism (trope)|the trope page]] for more discussion, as this is most an index of works with these theme.

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[[Category:Existentialism]]