Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems

Evidence

This ‘bloom’ of experience and communication lies at the heart of the human mystery: it is what makes possible the living, conscious, embodied beings that we are. It also happens to be the subject to which phenomenologists and existentialists devoted most of their research. They set out to detect and capture the quality of experience as we live it rather than according to the frameworks suggested by traditional philosophy, psychology, Marxism, Hegelianism, structuralism, or any of the other -isms and disciplines that explain our lives away. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1025

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the movement’s core project as capturing lived experience against all systematic frameworks that ‘explain our lives away’ — essential orientation for a newcomer.
• XREF: The ‘-isms that explain our lives away’ echoes later critiques (postmodernism, scientism) of totalizing systems — connects to Frankfurt school and to Don DeLillo’s suspicion of grand narratives. — connects to: Freudian and existential analyses both treat acts as symbols of deeper structures; Existential psychoanalysis rejects the unconscious and makes psychic acts coextensive with consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1340; Existential psychoanalysis decodes behavior to reveal each person’s fundamental choice of being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1346 (+29 more)

Broader Connections

• Existentialist philosophy values active engaged form over abstract speculation #corroborates (0.90) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 38
• Existentialist philosophy demands literary form to convey embodied lived experience #expands (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 37