existentialism

n. 20th-century philosophical movement stressing the subjective aspect of human existence and man's responsibility for it

Existentialism is a philosophical movement which claims that individual human beings create the meanings and essence of their own lives.It is a reaction against more traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and empiricism, which sought to discover an ultimate order in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world, and therefore universal meaning. The movement had its origins in the 19th century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and was prevalent in Continental philosophy. In the 1940s and 1950s, French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote scholarly and fictional works that helped to popularize themes associated with existentialism, including "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, [and] nothingness".
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1914 philosophical theory concerned with the being of individuals in a meaningless universe - of some influence to artist movements

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Noun
1. (philosophy) a 20th-century philosophical movement; assumes that people are entirely free and thus responsible for what they make of themselves
(synonym) existentialist philosophy
(hypernym) philosophical doctrine, philosophical theory
(classification) philosophy
(class) depersonalization, depersonalisation

filoz. lit. existentialism