[Sethomas]

I took a class on Existentialism and it was taught in a bit of a roundabout way, so I never really picked up exactly when people who we now call "existentialist" actually started actually using that as a banner. I know that Sartre defined himself as an atheist existentialist, and that Camus refused to be labelled as such, but whether Kierkegaard or Dostoyevsky ever even heard of the term is a mystery to me.

The word existentialism is, as I've learned from experience, applied emotionally as a general detachment to any objective value to life, whether in general or one's own specific life. However, that doesn't really have anything to do with existentialism as a philosophy. By the 1930s the philosophical movement was firmly stratified into Christian, Atheist, and Agnostic Existentialism, but the term existential in the emotional sense was invented out of a criticism from the French mainstream Catholic community, as well as the Christian Existentialist movement, toward the Atheist Existentialists.

Christian Existentialism, for instance, tends to focus on taking one's own religious ideas or doctrines and applying them to achieve personal meaning rather than just social conformity. This is basically the only thing Kierkegaard (the "father of existentialism") had in mind with his writings: the dichotomy of Christianity versus Christendom. Kierkegaard's strategy was to always analyze a number of situations and reducing them to a small number of possible interpretations, but never choosing the "right" one--that's something that each person must do for himself.

This general strategy, after several decades of elaboration by numerous others who might or might not be called "existentialist" coagulated into the one axiom of Existentialism as defined by Sartre, "existence precedes essence". In the atheist camp, however, this implies that there is no external reality to what we experience and so existence has no essence whatsoever until we decide to give it some. Hence the stereotype that existentialism is about whining how pointless life is.