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Existentialism is not a philosophy. It is something different philosophers, both modern and ancient
have in common. The appellation "existential" for such philosophies is modern, to distinguish such
philosophers or philosophies from the dominant schools of modernism, rationalism on one hand and
empiricism on the other.
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To return to your query: what is it that these philosophers/philosophies have in common? It is a
concrete sense of our existence. Now this concrete sense may be understood in our ordinary way as
experience.Therefore, an existential philosophy is about experience, either it starts with experience
or refers back to it; in either case, experience runs a check on it. But some existentialists find
"experience" too psychological as a category, too subjective, therefore, too liable to be hijacked by
the modes of rationalism, and its concomitant, empiricism. Existential experience is not so much
subjective and individual for these philosophers, but world-historical, what they would call "essential",
an idea which hearkens back to the possibility of experience of the eternalin Christian philosophy,
much of which, in the early days, and always in the Orthodox world, related to experience. As Paul
said, my experience is not "my" experience, "but Christ's in me". In the age of subjectivity we can't
think of our experience this way very easily or naturally, but some existentialists still try and think
experience outside the category of the ego. The most famous and successful examples are that of
Hegel and Heidegger.
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