Existentialism, Checked
What Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus Actually Wrote

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Existentialism is the philosophy of freedom, choice and meaning, and it is quoted everywhere. Here are nine claims about its three most-quoted names, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Sartre and Camus are still in copyright, so we quote them briefly, through the scholars and reference works that quote them: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Oxford Essential Quotations, the Société des Études camusiennes and the publisher Gallimard.

1. “Existentialism was a school, and Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus belonged to it”

Myth The Stanford Encyclopedia says the word was “first introduced by Marcel in 1943” and “is certainly not a reference to a coherent system or philosophical school.” Of the thinkers usually grouped under it, “only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly self-identified as ‘existentialists.’” Marcel, who introduced the word, at first accepted “Christian Existentialism” as a name for his own work, the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on him notes, and “later repudiated” it. Camus was not one of the two: according to the Stanford Encyclopedia, Sartre “accepted the ‘existentialist’ label that Camus rejected”, and the Internet Encyclopedia says “throughout his career Camus repeatedly denied that he was an existentialist”. Heidegger, often listed too, answered questions about the movement in a letter published in 1947 as the Letter on Humanism; there, in the Internet Encyclopedia’s words, “he repudiates any possible connection of his philosophy with the existentialism of Sartre.”

Kierkegaard could not have joined: he lived from 1813 to 1855. The Stanford Encyclopedia treats him as one of the nineteenth-century “pioneers” who laid “the conceptual groundwork” long before the name existed.

2. “Kierkegaard is the father of existentialism”

Partly true He is often called that, and the influence is real. But the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on him warns: “this label obscures at least as much as it reveals, especially to those who associate existentialism with atheistic figures such as Sartre.” Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813, said in his own voice that he was “from first to last a religious author”, as the Stanford Encyclopedia reports (a claim the same entry says “has been hotly contested”), and the entry notes that his writings have influenced non-Christian thinkers “despite his own Christian motivations”.

3. “Kierkegaard said we must take a leap of faith”

Myth as a quotation. The idea of a leap is his; the three-word phrase is not. Kierkegaard wrote about a Spring, Danish for “leap”. The Stanford Encyclopedia summarises one of his books, The Concept of Anxiety (1844): “a morally free action always comes from a ‘leap’”.

The phrase itself was searched for by computer. The philosopher Alastair McKinnon, writing in the journal Kierkegaardiana in 1993, searched a machine-readable copy of the third edition of Kierkegaard’s collected works and reported that the Danish equivalent “does not occur in any of the thirty five works in that edition”. His conclusion: “Kierkegaard never used this phrase”. Mariele Nientied (2003) reports the same result: “leap of faith” “does not occur even once in the published writings”. Both results cover his published works, not his private journals.

Disputed is the fairer verdict on whether it is a good summary. Reference works still use it as a description: the Internet Encyclopedia writes of “the religious leap of faith”, and the Stanford Encyclopedia has Abraham “‘leaping’ (springer) into a paradox”. McKinnon grants that Kierkegaard “plainly thought of faith as involving something like a leap”, but argues the slogan should go: in his counts the Danish words for faith and leap show “a marked tendency not to co-occur” in the same sentences, the leap belongs with sin and the Fall rather than with faith, and the phrase is “incoherent and meaningless” because it builds faith into the leap that is supposed to reach faith. Nientied allows that the missing wording is not decisive, since the phrase “might be seen as an appropriate summary of Kierkegaardian thinking although it cannot be quoted”, then argues that the charges it has been used to support, such as irrationalism, rest on “a misleading interpretation”. So: wrong in quotation marks; argued over as a loose description; and McKinnon and Nientied both reject it as evidence that he gave up on reason.

4. “Existence precedes essence”

True It is Sartre’s. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on him says he “famously remarks” it “in both Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism”, the public lecture that “many thousands of Parisians packed into” “towards the end of 1945”. Oxford Essential Quotations gives a fuller wording from Being and Nothingness (1943): “Existence precedes and rules essence.”

What it means, in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s words: “there is no pre-given or essential nature that determines us.” The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on existentialism notes a precursor in Heidegger’s Being and Time: “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence”.

5. “Hell is other people”

True as a line, but its popular meaning is argued. It is in Sartre’s play No Exit (Huis clos), first staged in 1944; Oxford Essential Quotations gives “Hell is other people” and places it in scene 5. The Stanford Encyclopedia reads the line as the result of a “struggle for self-assertion” between people, and the Internet Encyclopedia calls the play a dramatisation of a “‘hell’ of endlessly circling acts of freedom and objectification”.

It is often read as a plain complaint about other people. Sartre’s own gloss adds something the slogan leaves out. Gallimard, his publisher, issued a 1964 studio recording of the play, preceded by an interview Sartre gave to Moshé Naïm, and its page for the recording quotes him saying he wanted to show “l’importance, chez nous, de la liberté”, “the importance, for us, of freedom”, and: “Quel que soit le cercle d’enfer dans lequel nous vivons, je pense que nous sommes libres de le briser.” In our translation (both lines): “Whatever circle of hell we live in, I think we are free to break it.”

6. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”

True It is the last line of Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus, finished in February 1941 and published by Gallimard in October 1942, according to the Société des Études camusiennes. In French: “la lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” The English translation quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia reads: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy”.

The essay opens with its famous first line, which in French reads “Il n’y a qu’un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c’est le suicide”, “there is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide”. English translations word it differently, so quote the translation you have. The question is asked in order to be answered, and the Internet Encyclopedia states the answer plainly: “In the end, Camus rejects suicide.” On the same page it sums up his view that “the task of living should not merely be accepted, it must be embraced.”

7. “Life begins on the other side of despair” — Sartre

Partly true A version of it is real, but the popular wording drops a word and it is not Sartre speaking in his own voice. Oxford Essential Quotations gives it as “Human life begins on the far side of despair”, from his play The Flies (Les Mouches, 1943), act 3, scene 2. It is a character’s line in a play, not a statement in an essay.

8. “Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend” — Camus

Myth Giovanni Gaetani’s study of Camus misquotes in the Journal of Camus Studies (2015) puts it first on his list and concludes that nobody can give a source, “since Camus simply never wrote it”. He found that it “belongs to a Jewish song for children”. Who first wrote it, and how Camus’s name got attached to it, is not known.

9. “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer” — Camus

Partly true The sentence is his, but it also circulates inside a longer “letter” that he did not write. Gaetani again: “While Camus is not the author of this honeyed letter, he is surely the author of the isolated sentence”. It comes from “Retour à Tipasa” (“Return to Tipasa”), an essay in L’Été (Summer), which Gallimard published in 1954. The French, as Gaetani gives it: “Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais enfin qu’il y avait en moi un été invincible.” A closer translation is ours: “In the middle of winter, I was at last learning that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Our reading

The lines on the page are harder than the posters. Kierkegaard wrote about a leap, but never “leap of faith”, and McKinnon and Nientied both reject the slogan as proof that he gave up on reason. Sartre said his hell was also about freedom, and that its circle can be broken. Camus asks what he called the one truly serious philosophical problem so that he can answer it in favour of living. If a line sounds like a greeting card, the page it came from is worth a look.

Sources

• Kevin Aho, “Existentialism”; John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans, “Søren Kierkegaard”; Jack Reynolds and Pierre-Jean Renaudie, “Jean-Paul Sartre”; Ronald Aronson, “Albert Camus”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Douglas Burnham and George Papandreopoulos, “Existentialism”; David Simpson, “Albert Camus”; William McDonald, “Søren Kierkegaard”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• “Gabriel Marcel”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Alastair McKinnon, “Kierkegaard and ‘The Leap of Faith’”, Kierkegaardiana 16 (1993).
• Mariele Nientied, “Kierkegaard without ‘Leap of Faith’”, Papers of the 26th International Wittgenstein Symposium (2003).
• Giovanni Gaetani, “The Noble Art of Misquoting Camus – From Its Origins to the Internet Era”, Journal of Camus Studies (2015).
• Oxford Essential Quotations, 4th ed., ed. Susan Ratcliffe (Oxford University Press, online 2016), “Jean-Paul Sartre”.
• Société des Études camusiennes, “Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1941)” and “L’Été (1954)”.
• Gallimard, Huis clos, collection À voix haute (audio CD, 2004).

Checked September 2026.

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