Four thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took a shared experience as the starting point of their philosophy: that human beings find themselves in a world that offers no instructions for how to live. Søren Kierkegaard (1813—1855), Martin Heidegger (1889—1976), Karl Jaspers (1883—1969), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905—1980) form the core of what entered intellectual history as existential philosophy. They share neither a system nor a method. What binds them is a refusal to define the human being by way of an abstract essence. Instead, they begin with what everyone knows and few can bear: the bare fact of being here.
Anxiety as a Guide
Kierkegaard laid the groundwork. In The Concept of Anxiety (1844) he distinguishes anxiety from fear. Fear has an object: the dog, the loss, the illness. Anxiety has none. It is directed at the possible as such — at the fact that in every moment a person must choose, with no higher authority to make the choice for them. For Kierkegaard this anxiety is not a weakness but a distinction. It marks the point at which a person can no longer delegate the relationship to themselves.
Heidegger radicalised this insight ontologically in Being and Time (1927). The human being, which he calls Dasein, is thrown into the world (Geworfenheit) without having chosen it. One always already finds oneself amid moods, relations, and webs of meaning that one did not create. The fundamental condition of Dasein is Being-toward-death: finitude does not attach to life as an external boundary but permeates it from within. Whoever represses death lives in the “they” (das Man), in inauthenticity — guided by what one does, what one thinks, what one considers normal.
Jaspers, working in parallel, developed the concept of the limit situation (Grenzsituation). Death, guilt, chance, struggle, and suffering are situations that cannot be resolved. They can only be endured. In the limit situation, ordinary understanding of the world breaks down, and in that breakdown the possibility opens for a person to seize themselves as existence. Jaspers calls this Existenzerhellung — the illumination of existence: not a theory of being but an awakening within it.
Existence Precedes Essence
Sartre coined the most famous formula: “L’existence précède l’essence” — existence precedes essence. The entire Western metaphysical tradition had defined the human being by a predetermined nature: as a rational animal, as a creature of God, as the bearer of an immortal soul. Sartre reverses that order. A person does not first be something and then act accordingly. One acts first, and what one is only emerges through one’s decisions. In Being and Nothingness (1943) Sartre pursues this insight to its final consequences: the human being is condemned to freedom. Every excuse, every appeal to circumstances, upbringing, or character is mauvaise foi — bad faith — the attempt to hide from one’s own freedom.
Together, these four thinkers paint a picture of the human being that manages without cosmological support. The sky is empty, the world mute, the human thrown back upon itself. What remains is the decision to face this situation — courageously or in cowardice, authentically or in self-deception.
What Existential Philosophy Sees — and What It Misses
The strength of existential philosophy lies in its unyielding insistence. It refuses to dissolve the human being into systems, whether Hegel’s dialectic, Freud’s drive economy, or sociological functionalism. It insists on the individual, on the irreplaceability of personal experience, on the gravity of the situation.
Its limit appears where diagnosis ends and the question of direction begins. Heidegger describes Geworfenheit with a precision that still commands attention, yet his Dasein is structurally solitary: it has no cosmological place, no participation in a living order that reaches beyond the subject. Jaspers speaks of transcendence but deliberately leaves it standing as a cipher — undecipherable, inaccessible to methodical thought. Sartre severs the connection to the cosmos entirely: the human being invents itself in a world that remains indifferent.
Jochen Kirchhoff described this condition as an “inversion of Being” (Umstulpung des Seins) — a state in which the interiority of the world has migrated into the abstract objectivity of natural science and the human being finds itself in a disenchanted cosmos. Existential philosophy captures this state with great acuity. But it describes it as though it were the fundamental condition of human existence, rather than a historically produced narrowing.
From Thrownness to Birth
The natural philosophy of the Schelling-Goethe lineage, on which Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s philosophical practice rests, begins at a different point. The human being is not thrown into a mute world. It stands within a living order that sustains it and to which it can respond. In his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), Schelling (1775—1854) explicitly used the concept of existence to mean that which emerges from the ground: existence as emergence, not as mere presence-at-hand.
This distinction is not academic. Existential philosophy understands the human being as a finite creature that must come to terms with its finitude. The natural-philosophical tradition understands it as a being in which a cosmic Anthropos is latent — a primordial form that reaches beyond the finite without denying it. The reduction of existence to the span between birth and death, as Jochen Kirchhoff put it, is “actually grotesque — in purely philosophical terms one would have to call it superficial and utterly flat thinking.”
What existential philosophy describes as Geworfenheit can be read, in the language of philosophical accompaniment, as pre-birth: a life that has not yet begun to recognise itself for what it is. The anxiety Kierkegaard diagnosed then ceases to be a permanent condition one must endure and becomes the signal of an impending birth process. The nihilism that Nietzsche diagnosed in The Gay Science (1882) as the devaluation of all highest values is, from this perspective, not the final word but a transitional phase.
Between Diagnosis and Practice
Existential philosophy deserves its place in intellectual history because it poses questions that no honest person can avoid: What does it mean to be mortal? What do I owe my freedom? How do I live in the face of the fact that nothing is guaranteed? Those who bring these questions to philosophical accompaniment often carry precisely the experience that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers described: the feeling of groundlessness, of indeterminate anxiety, of missing foundations.
The work begins where the diagnosis of existential philosophy leaves off. It asks not only: How does it stand with the human being? But: What becomes possible when crisis is understood not as a defect but as a process of birth? The anxiety Kierkegaard described so precisely is then not a sign that we have been thrown into a meaningless world. It is a sign that something is seeking to be born.
Those who wish to think further in this direction will find the concepts pre-birth, birth process, and cosmic Anthropos as continuations of what existential philosophy frames as thrownness, anxiety, and finitude. Nihilism names the cultural dimension of the existential crisis; German Idealism names the philosophical tradition in which an alternative was articulated.