What Does 'Existential' Mean?

I’ve been seeing the word “existential” in the news recently because of a recent Trump administration report projecting global temperatures will rise 4 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, and the recent climate change report from the United Nations scientific panel that says we have about 10 years to get climate change under control or life on earth—from humans to coral—will suffer.

An Existential Threat

“Existential” can seem like a big, incomprehensible word until you realize it’s related to the word “exist.” In fact, it comes from a Latin word that means “to exist,” and when “existential” is used in its most literal sense, it relates to being. For example, an “existential threat to humanity” is something that threatens humanity’s continued existence or being. For example, the world’s stockpile of nuclear bombs could also be considered an existential threat to humanity because there are enough of them to wipe us out.

Existentialism

“Existential” also has a meaning tied to existentialism—a branch of philosophy that deals with existence. Existentialism was begun by Kierkegaard and expanded by philosophers including Sartre and Camus.

'Existential' comes from a Latin word that means 'to exist.'

The field deals with questions about the meaninglessness of human life and a person’s individual freedom and responsibility to make his or her life meaningful in some way. 

An Existential Crisis

For example, an existential crisis could be characterized by thoughts such as “I’m just one out of more than 7 billion people on earth. Why does my individual life have meaning?”

Interestingly, one study found that about 35 percent of Germans are existentially indifferent in that when asked, they said they didn’t feel like their lives had meaning, but they also didn’t care. From what I can gather, they just didn’t think about it very...

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