School · 22 thinkers

Life & Existential Philosophy

22 thinkers of Life & Existential Philosophy on the Agora star map, from Arthur Schopenhauer to Albert Camus, in chronological order.

• 1788–1860Arthur Schopenhauer

  Behind everything is a blind, restless will that makes life suffering; art and compassion offer the only relief.

• 1806–1856Max Stirner

  God, humanity, the state and morality are mere ideas that haunt us – nothing is real except the unique individual and what it can call its own.

• 1813–1855Søren Kierkegaard

  Each person faces their choices alone, and the anxiety of being free can only be answered by a leap into faith.

• 1821–1881Fyodor Dostoevsky

  For Dostoevsky, the question is whether, without God, everything is permitted – and his novels show freedom as a burden people are tempted to give away.

• 1828–1910Leo Tolstoy

  Live by the Gospel’s command never to use violence, even against evil, and reject the state, the church and wealth that depend on it.

• 1833–1911Wilhelm Dilthey

  We explain nature from outside, but we understand human life from within – so the human sciences need their own method.

• 1842–1927Georg Brandes

  A literature is alive only if it puts problems up for debate – marriage, religion, property, women’s position – rather than serving tradition; freedom from church and convention measures progress, and great individuals, as he read in Nietzsche, are the bearers of culture.

• 1844–1900Friedrich Nietzsche

  For Nietzsche, belief in God has collapsed, so traditional morality has lost its ground – and we must create new values of our own instead of sinking into nihilism.

• 1849–1926Ellen Key

  Education should let the child grow according to its own nature, with as little interference as possible, at home and at school without beatings or drill; love, not convention, makes a marriage moral, and motherhood is a creative task for which society bears responsibility.

• 1859–1941Henri Bergson

  Lived time flows and cannot be cut into measurable pieces, and intuition grasps this creative flow of life better than the intellect does.

• 1861–1937Lou Andreas-Salomé

  Lou Andreas-Salomé studied Nietzsche’s philosophy together with his personality in her book of 1894, and from 1912 on turned to psychoanalysis, which she practised in Göttingen.

• 1864–1936Miguel de Unamuno

  For Unamuno, every human being of flesh and bone hungers not to die; reason cannot prove that this hope is justified and faith cannot give it up, so we must live in that conflict, with a faith that doubts and struggles.

• 1866–1938Lev Shestov

  Reason bows to necessity and calls it truth, but for God all things are possible; philosophy must take the side of the suffering individual against self-evidence, as Job and Kierkegaard did.

• 1878–1965Martin Buber

  We can treat others as things to use or meet them as a “Thou” – and we only become fully human in such meetings.

• 1883–1969Karl Jaspers

  In limit situations like death, guilt and suffering we become aware of ourselves and of something beyond everything we can know.

• 1883–1955José Ortega y Gasset

  I am I and my circumstance: the radical reality is each person’s own life, and reason must be vital and historical, understanding human beings through what they have lived and done, for every life sees the world from its own perspective.

• 1895–1961Lucian Blaga

  The world hides a mystery that no knowledge can dissolve; genuine knowledge does not reduce it but deepens it, and every culture gives it shape according to an unconscious style of its own.

• 1904–1991María Zambrano

  A reason that shuts out feeling, dream and the sacred cannot understand human life; philosophy must become poetic reason, which receives what is given instead of conquering it and lets what has no voice come to speech.

• 1905–1980Jean-Paul Sartre

  There is no fixed human nature; we are completely free and responsible for what we make of ourselves, and that freedom frightens us.

• 1908–1986Simone de Beauvoir

  One is not born a woman but made into one by society – and real freedom means taking responsibility for an open, uncertain existence.

• 1911–1995Emil Cioran

  For Cioran, lucidity unmasks hope, progress and history as illusions; the misfortune lies not in death but in having been born, and the aphorism is the form of a thought that refuses every system and every fanaticism.

• 1913–1960Albert Camus

  For Camus, life has no given meaning, yet we should not escape into despair or faith but live fully in revolt against the absurd.

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