existentia

Latin existentia derived from existere: ex (out) and sistere (to stand). To exist was to stand out, to be distinguishable, to have presence. Existentia was the state of standing out from nothing — being. The scholastic philosophers contrasted existentia (the fact of existing) with essentia (what a thing essentially is): first you exist, then you are something in particular.

Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher, is considered the father of existentialism, though he did not use the term. He focused on the subjective experience of the existing individual — on anxiety, despair, and the inescapable burden of choice. His Christian existentialism emphasized the paradox of faith: the subjective commitment to an objectively uncertain claim.

Jean-Paul Sartre coined existentialism as a philosophical label in his 1945 lecture 'Existentialism is a Humanism.' His famous thesis — 'existence precedes essence' — inverted the scholastic formula: humans exist first, without predetermined nature, and through their choices they create what they are. There is no human nature given in advance; freedom is total and inescapable. This freedom is experienced as anguish.

Simone de Beauvoir applied existentialist thought to feminism in The Second Sex (1949), arguing that 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — that femininity was a social construction imposed on women rather than an essential nature. The existentialist insight that existence precedes essence became a tool for social critique, challenging every claim that human arrangements were natural and necessary.