A reply to a friend who was puzzled about what existentialism meant, despite reading a book about it.

...As for existentialism, my teacher said that its simply a name for the various dissenting opinions to Hegel, minus England and America. I would explain it further: it is the reaction, amongst thinkers in continental Europe (or at least a certain bourgeois element,) against Hegelianism--understood in the banal sense of the end of history. Or, the reaction of thinkers in touch with the radical contingency of existence, in the face of the totalizing temporal narrative that, as it were, "internalized" or "historicized" the totalizing spatial narrative of Aristotelianism (that the universe is a closed and finite system contained by a firmament.) Essentially, this describes its roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who lodged themselves in the contingent, and in Kierkegaard's case, out of the infinite.

But it was the experience of the world wars in particular that developed existentialism's morbidity and, ultimately, its stance from the isolated individual. Continent wide there was an experience with death that can scarcely be described. And this death led not unto life, either the eternal in Kierkegaard or the cyclic becoming of Nietzsche, but was "the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." It was, in Heidegger's words, the "own-most possibility of impossibility" and something that one faced entirely alone.

Everything else was inauthentic, because it could be given over to someone else. other people can live for me--supply the word is think and say, and provide the template for the actions that I do. But no one can die my death for me, so the story goes. At the same time, however, this death formed the definition or limits of life, such that life became defined by the contours of this possibility of impossibility, and specifically its character as utterly individual in character.

These later developments to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche serve, in fact, to merely repeat the Hegelian narrative of the ending of existence in a way that is "always already in each case mine"--that is, repeated as a kind of fractal in each individual life, and each individual moment. It is a view from within finite existence, and hence possesses none of the joy of the infinite, and none of its ability to merge the tragic and comic at infinity. Instead, existentialism tries to self-create this joy in the figure of Sisyphus, deriving the comic out of the tragic by some impossible logic.