Existentialism

In brief

Existentialism is the claim that there is no human nature written in advance. A paper knife has an essence before it exists: someone conceives its function, then manufactures it to fit. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that a human being is the reverse. We first exist, turn up in the world, and only afterward define what we are through the choices we make. "Existence precedes essence" is the slogan he coined in a 1945 lecture, published as Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946). If no god or nature assigns us a purpose, then nothing outside us can tell us what to do or excuse us for what we do. We are, in Sartre's phrase, "condemned to be free." That freedom is not a comfort. It carries total responsibility, produces anguish, and tempts us constantly into bad faith: the lie we tell ourselves that we had no choice.

The full treatment

The problem it answers

For most of Western history, the meaning of a human life was underwritten from outside. Classical thought held that humans have a fixed nature and a proper end (Aristotle's flourishing). Christianity held that God created us for a purpose and would judge us against it. These frameworks answered the question "what should I do?" by pointing to an authority above the individual.

By the nineteenth century that authority was collapsing. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) gave the collapse its most famous name when his madman announced that "God is dead, and we have killed him" (The Gay Science, 1882). Nietzsche is the great forerunner here: he saw that once the theological foundation goes, so does the guarantee that human life has any given meaning, and that the danger is not sudden despair but a slow nihilism in which nothing seems to matter. Existentialism is the tradition that takes this predicament as its starting point and refuses both consolations: it will not smuggle back a hidden purpose, and it will not conclude that because nothing is given, nothing is worth anything. See moral-nihilism for the position existentialism defines itself against.

How it works: freedom, responsibility, anguish

If there is no essence to conform to, every human act is a choice, even the refusal to choose. Sartre pushes this to its limit in Being and Nothingness (1943). Consciousness (what he calls the "for-itself") is precisely the kind of being that is never simply identical with itself: it can always negate its situation, imagine otherwise, and decide. A rock is what it is. A person is always what they are not yet.

From this Sartre draws a severe consequence. Because I am free in every situation, I am responsible not only for my actions but for the meaning I give my whole life, and even, Sartre says, for the way I take up circumstances I did not choose. There is no alibi. Sartre calls the emotional register of this realization anguish: the dizziness that comes when you grasp that nothing outside you underwrites your choice. He borrows Kierkegaard's image of the man on a cliff edge who feels dread not only of falling but of the fact that nothing prevents him from throwing himself off. The dread is the felt weight of freedom.

The key move: bad faith

The most influential single idea to come out of existentialism is Sartre's bad faith (mauvaise foi): the self-deception by which we flee our own freedom by pretending we do not have it. His examples are famous. The waiter who overplays being a waiter, moving a little too precisely, is trying to coincide with his role as if it were an essence, to be a waiter the way an inkwell is an inkwell, so that he need not confront the freedom underneath the apron. The woman on a date who lets a man take her hand while telling herself she has not noticed, treating her own body as a thing detached from her decisions, is doing the same. Bad faith is not ordinary lying, because in a lie you know the truth you conceal. It is the harder trick of being both the deceiver and the deceived, hiding a truth from yourself. Its opposite is authenticity: living in clear acknowledgment that you are free, that your situation is yours to interpret, and that you own the results.

The absurd: Camus and the missing meaning

Albert Camus (1913 to 1960) approached the same collapse from a different angle and, notably, denied he was an existentialist at all. His concern is the absurd, which he locates not in the world and not in us but in the collision between the two: the human demand for meaning meets a universe that returns only silence. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) he opens with the claim that there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, which is suicide: the question of whether life, once seen as absurd, is worth living. His answer is that it is, but not by restoring meaning. We must live without appeal, in lucid revolt, holding both the demand and the silence in view without collapsing either. Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder up the hill forever, is his emblem of a life that has no external point and is embraced anyway. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" is the essay's last line. Where Sartre insists we create meaning by choosing, Camus is more austere: he refuses even that, and asks only that we not lie about the absurd.

The ethics: de Beauvoir and freedom for others

Existentialism was accused of licensing anything, since if there are no given values then no choice is better than another. Simone de Beauvoir (1908 to 1986) answered this most directly in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), the tradition's most serious attempt at a positive ethics. Her argument: freedom is the one thing existentialism cannot treat as arbitrary, because it is the source of all value. To will my own freedom authentically is to will the conditions in which freedom exists at all, and that means willing the freedom of others, since a free being in a world of the oppressed and mystified is not fully free. Oppression is wrong on this view because it cuts other people off from the open future that makes them human. In The Second Sex (1949) she applies the analysis to women: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," her most quoted line, is the existentialist thesis that there is no fixed feminine essence, turned into a tool for showing how women have been cast as the "Other" against a masculine norm and denied the standing of a free subject.

Distinctions that matter

Existentialism is not the same as nihilism. Nihilism says nothing has value; existentialism says nothing has value in advance, and that this is exactly why our own choosing confers it. It is also not the same as pessimism, though Sartre had to defend it against that charge in the 1946 lecture. Nor is it a single doctrine: it splits between the religious existentialism of Kierkegaard, who saw the individual's dread resolved only in a "leap of faith" toward God, and the atheist existentialism of Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, for whom no such leap is available. What unites them is the priority of the concrete, choosing individual over any system, essence, or abstraction that would explain the individual away.

Lineage

The first thinker usually called existentialist is Soren Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855), who reacted against the vast rational system of Hegel by insisting that truth is "subjectivity" and that a self is not a fact but a task, achieved in fear and trembling before an infinite God (Fear and Trembling, 1843; The Sickness unto Death, 1849). Nietzsche supplied the diagnosis of the death of God and the challenge to create values without divine sanction. The method came from phenomenology: Edmund Husserl (1859 to 1938) taught his students to describe lived experience exactly as it presents itself, and Martin Heidegger (1889 to 1976), in Being and Time (1927), turned that method on human existence itself, analyzing our being-toward-death and our tendency to lose ourselves in the anonymous "they." Sartre fused this phenomenological apparatus with Cartesian starting points and, encountering it during and after the Second World War, made existentialism the defining philosophy of a generation in occupied and liberated Paris. The tradition also carries a debt to Hegel, whose account of consciousness recognizing itself through others runs beneath de Beauvoir's analysis of self and Other.

The strongest case for it

Existentialism takes seriously a problem most philosophies dodge: how to live once the old sources of meaning have genuinely stopped commanding assent. It does not paper the gap over with a substitute authority, and it does not retreat into despair. It says the absence of a given purpose is the precondition of dignity, because a life whose meaning was assigned from outside would not be ours. It restores agency to people who had learned to see themselves as products of circumstance, class, biology, or role, and it does so without denying that circumstance is real. Its concept of bad faith is a permanently useful piece of psychological insight, naming with precision the ways we disown our own decisions ("I had no choice," "that is just how I am"). And in de Beauvoir it produced an ethics and a feminism of lasting force, showing that "make yourself" is not a recipe for selfishness but, followed honestly, a demand to secure the freedom of everyone.

The strongest case against it

The objections are serious and come from several directions.

The charge of empty formalism, pressed by many critics: if there are no antecedent values, "choose authentically" tells you nothing about what to choose. A resolute torturer and a resolute saint are both, on the face of it, exercising radical freedom. De Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity is the attempt to answer this by grounding value in freedom itself, but critics reply that the derivation from "I value my freedom" to "I must value yours" does not obviously go through.

The Marxist objection, made by Herbert Marcuse in a 1948 review and later, in altered form, by Sartre against himself: existentialist freedom is a bourgeois illusion. To tell a starving worker they are radically free and wholly responsible for the meaning of their situation ignores the material and structural forces that actually constrain lives. Sartre took this seriously enough to spend much of his later career, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), trying to reconcile existentialism with Marxism.

The theological objection, from thinkers such as Gabriel Marcel: atheist existentialism inflates the human will into a false god, asking finite creatures to be the sole authors of value, a burden he thought only crushed them.

The analytic and scientific objection: the picture of a consciousness that transcends all causes and is free in "every situation" sits badly with a naturalistic understanding of human beings as embodied, evolved, and causally embedded. Sartre's near-absolute freedom looks, to many, like a metaphysical overclaim rather than a description. (See free-will for the wider dispute.)

The objection from Heidegger himself, in his Letter on Humanism (1947), who rejected Sartre's reading of him and denied that his own thought was a humanism or an existentialism at all, arguing that Sartre had simply inverted the old metaphysics rather than escaping it.

Where it stands now

As a self-identified movement with a Parisian center, existentialism was largely eclipsed by structuralism and then poststructuralism from the 1960s on, which attacked its central figure: where existentialism made the free subject the ground of meaning, thinkers such as Levi-Strauss, Althusser, and Foucault argued that the "subject" is itself produced by language, structure, and power. Yet the core commitments survive and spread widely. Its therapeutic branch is alive: existential psychotherapy, developed by figures like Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Irvin Yalom, treats anxiety about freedom, meaning, isolation, and death as the real material of a life rather than as pathology. Its literary reach is permanent, through the novels and plays of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir and their influence on writers worldwide. And its central questions, whether life has a given purpose, what we owe our own freedom, how to act without a guarantee, are not the kind that get settled and closed. They return whenever an old certainty falls away, which is to say, continually.

Test yourself

Think of something about yourself you tend to describe as fixed: "I'm just not a math person," "I could never speak in public," "that's not who I am." Now ask whether it is really an essence you were issued, or a choice you have made and re-made and could, in principle, make differently. Notice how uncomfortable the second reading is. Sartre would say that discomfort is the taste of your own freedom, and that the urge to insist "no, that's just how I am" is bad faith doing its work.