Hegel and Kierkegaard together form the twin sources of existentialism

Evidence

Beauvoir still did not know whether Sartre was alive. To keep herself calm (and warm) she started going every afternoon, after a morning’s teaching or writing, to the Bibliothèque nationale or the library of the Sorbonne, where she read her way through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. … It was then that Kierkegaard had more to offer. She read him as well — that awkward, anguished, irreverent anti-Hegelian. Reading both at once must have been disorienting, yet somehow, like just the right combination of uppers and downers, it gave her what she needed. Both philosophies found their way into her gradually evolving novel L’invitée. They would become two key sources for her and for existentialism in general: Kierkegaard with his insistence on freedom and choice, and Hegel with his vision of how history plays out on an epic scale, swallowing up individuals. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 460

Categorization

• DEFINE: Nice compact orientation to the movement: Hegel (epic historical vision) and Kierkegaard (freedom and individual choice) as the two poles existentialism oscillates between — directly serves the reading purpose of orientation.
• XREF: Connects to the stated reading purpose — this is a map of the movement’s two founding poles, useful for understanding later splits between Sartrean freedom and later historicist/postmodern readings. — connects to: Nietzsche and Kierkegaard defined existence as choice, action and self-assertion; Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were deliberately provocative contrarian precursors to existentialism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 56; Kierkegaard deliberately provoked people into feeling existence’s passion rather than abstraction — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 58 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1025
• Existentialists share the belief that existence precedes essence #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 7
• Existentialism holds that philosophy grows out of concrete lived experience #expands (0.82) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 54
• Beauvoir’s system-based definition of philosophy would exclude Kierkegaard and Nietzsche #corroborates (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 34