a philosophical movement characterized by enquiry into human beings’ experience of themselves in relation to the world, esp with reference to their freedom, responsibility, and isolation: compare essentialism
Existentialism or existential philosophy is a movement that is too varied to be defined by common tenets. It starts with individual human self, experiencing and trying to understand his or her situation in the world; an individual existence can never be properly described in abstract terms or reduced to something ‘objective’, like ‘human nature’. Nor is it ever self-identical, because of its duration in time. 20th-cent. existential thinkers (Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel), some of them atheists, some Christian, often refer to Kierkegaard as their spiritual ancestor — Professor Leszek Kołakowski
existentialist noun and adj
existentialistic /-ʹlistik/ adj