existentialism

[eg-zi-sten-shuh-liz-uhm, ek-si-]

noun

Philosophy.

1. a philosophical movement that stresses the individual's unique position as a self-determining agent responsible for making meaningful, authentic choices in a universe seen as purposeless or irrational: existentialism is associated especially with Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, and Sartre, and is opposed to philosophical rationalism and empiricism.

existentialism

/ ˌɛɡzɪˈstɛnʃəˌlɪzəm /

noun

1. a modern philosophical movement stressing the importance of personal experience and responsibility and the demands that they make on the individual, who is seen as a free agent in a deterministic and seemingly meaningless universe

existentialism

1. A movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, with some forerunners in earlier centuries. Existentialism stresses that people are entirely free and therefore responsible for what they make of themselves. With this responsibility comes a profound anguish or dread. Søren Kierkegaard and Feodor Dostoyevsky in the nineteenth century, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Camus in the twentieth century, were existentialist writers.

Other Word Forms

• existentialist adjective
• existentialistic adjective
• existentialistically adverb
• nonexistentialism noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of existentialism¹

First recorded in 1940–45; from German Existentialismus (1919); existential, -ism

Example Sentences

It’s confounding that Johnson ignores the book’s brutal existentialism.

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But it unfolds like more recent films such as “Inherent Vice” and “Under the Silver Lake” — self-conscious takes on L.A. noir that come with extra layers of existentialism and winking commentary.

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“We are gods,” a colleague insists to Cross in one of several midnight symposiums on ethics and existentialism.

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Later, in a film degree program at the University of Texas at Austin, he wrote scripts about existentialism.

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What it does, in practice, is lend a strange vibrancy to Dot’s back story that recalls the stop-motion existentialism of Charlie Kaufman’s “Anomalisa” in how it uses a familiar technique to unfamiliar ends.

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