Nausea

The word “existentialism” was coined by Gabriel Marcel around 1945. Marcel was naming a style of thinking concerned with existence, but not just any kind of existence. The concern of existentialists is human existence, understood to be distinct from the way that objects or even animals exist, because humans are, they claim, fundamentally concerned with their own existence. Heidegger wrote that human beings are the only beings for whom being is a problem. Kierkegaard wrote that an individual does more than merely exist, that an individual is “infinitely interested in existing,” and the philosopher Karl Jaspers had gone so far as to call his philosophy Existenzphilosophie. Of course, despite their shared concerns, existentialists are not all alike, and existentialism’s key figures either lived before Marcel coined the term (like Kierkegaard) or bristled at its application to them (like Sartre initially did). In general, however, we can say that existentialism focuses on human beings embedded in the world as humans—that is, with such things as moods and bodies and fundamental concerns about their own existence—and that existentialists approach problems familiar from the history of philosophy, such as epistemology, cognition, and ethics, from this