Current readings of existentialism are overly negative. It is not without reason
that existentialism has a reputation of pessimism preceding it, to the point that the
uninitiated cannot help but picture beatnik poets chain-smoking by the first syllable of the
name "Sartre." Existentialism, while a movement over one hundred and fifty years old,
is often characterized in the light of the media popularity it was given in the decade
following the Second World War-although much of the spirit of what is supposedly
existentialism came more as a response to the First. The Great War brought with it
devastation across Europe that it instilled a sense of malaise in an entire generation of
survivors. In the face of such violence, one of the common responses was to wonder if
there could truly be any sense of meaning or purpose to life. This movement,
philosophically, was existentialism.
Existentialism as a movement is not a denial of meaning. That is the role of
nihilism. Existentialism simply says there is no sense of predetermined meaning, and
that, in a particular formation, we are verbs before nouns: "to be" rather than a being
thing in any real sense. Of course, there is an obvious pessimistic reading of any text that
bases its thought on the foundation that humans are existent before their essence-if there
is no predetermined meaning in the world, there certainly is a possibility that there does
not have to be meaning in the world at all.
The future of the study of existential philosophy in part depends on its continuing
attractiveness to a new generation of scholars. One of the things holding existentialism
back is the alienating effect it can have on people-in large part because of its perceived
concurrence with negativity. The aforementioned lack of a predetermined essence can
cause anxiety, angst or anguish depending on whether you ask Søren Kierkegaard, Martin
Heidegger or Jean-Paul Sartre.
