Existencialism

EXISTENTIALISM
Terms of Existentialism:
Like “rationalism” and “empiricism,” “existentialism” is a term that belongs to intellectual history. Its definition is thus to some extent one ofhistorical convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and hisassociates—notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus—existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the majorphilosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom—for instance Camus and Heidegger—repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and GabrielMarcel in France, the Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. In paris there were Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and the expatriateSamuel Beckett; the Norwegian Knut Hamsun and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belong to the club; artists such as Alberto Giacometti and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, ArshileGorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a cliché,parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen

Origin of Existentialism:
Existentialism, as is evident from the name, is primarily concerned with existence. There are various questions raisedby Existentialism like, what is the purpose of my creation? What is the purpose of creation of this universe? Is there any God? Do I have any significance in this universe? Are we free only to becondemned? Etc.
The roots of Existentialism are hard to find. Some critics find it with Jean Paul Sartre because of his renowned book "Being and Nothingness". Some other find its emergence with...