What Is Existentialism and What Sartre Actually Meant

What Existentialism Is Not

Existentialism is one of the most frequently misrepresented philosophical movements. It is often associated with gloom, nihilism, black turtlenecks, and the claim that nothing matters. This caricature misses almost everything important. Existentialism is fundamentally a philosophy of radical freedom and responsibility. It argues that human beings are not defined in advance by essence, nature, God, or social role, but that they create themselves through their choices and actions. The anxiety this freedom produces is real, but the response existentialism recommends is engagement with the world, not withdrawal from it.

It is also not a single unified doctrine. Thinkers grouped under the label existentialist held widely diverging views. Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher often called the father of existentialism, was a deeply committed Christian. Martin Heidegger, whose analysis of human existence influenced almost every later existentialist, rejected the label entirely. Albert Camus, often associated with the movement, preferred the term absurdist and disagreed sharply with Sartre on key points. What unites them is a shared focus on concrete human existence, individual experience, freedom, and meaning rather than abstract systems.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Existence Precedes Essence

Jean-Paul Sartre is the thinker most closely identified with existentialism, partly because he embraced the label openly and partly because he gave the movement its most systematic philosophical treatment. His most famous claim is captured in the phrase existence precedes essence. To understand what this means, consider the contrast with a traditional metaphysical view in which human beings, like a hammer or a chair, have a pre-given nature that defines what they are and what they are for.

Sartre argues that for human beings, there is no such prior essence. We exist first and define ourselves afterward through our choices, projects, and commitments. There is no God who designed us with a purpose, no fixed human nature that dictates what we must do or be, and no social role that constitutes who we fundamentally are. This sounds liberating, but Sartre insists it is also terrifying: if there is no blueprint for what you should do, you bear full responsibility for every choice you make. This is what he calls radical freedom.

Bad Faith: The Escape from Freedom

If freedom is total, why do people so often behave as if they have no choice? Sartre's answer is the concept of bad faith (mauvaise foi). Bad faith is the self-deceptive strategy of pretending that one is determined by one's role, nature, circumstances, or other people's expectations, rather than acknowledging that one always has a choice, even if the options are terrible.

Sartre's famous example is the waiter who plays his role so completely and mechanically that he seems to have become the role itself, as though being a waiter were a fixed essence rather than a chosen performance. The waiter is in bad faith because he denies his own freedom by acting as though he could not choose differently. Another example involves someone who says they could not do otherwise, attributing their behavior entirely to their upbringing, their character, or external pressure. For Sartre, these are always evasions of the terrifying truth that one is always choosing.

Anguish, Abandonment, and Despair

Sartre articulates three emotional responses that honestly confront the human condition. Anguish arises from recognizing that in choosing, one chooses for all humanity: one's choice implicitly declares what a human being should do in this situation. When you decide how to live, you are, in effect, creating a model for what it is to be human. This responsibility extends beyond the self and is vertigo-inducing.

Abandonment refers to the fact that we are without excuses. God does not exist, in Sartre's view, and so there is no divine order to appeal to, no eternal values handed down from above, no human nature that tells us what is right. We are, as he puts it, condemned to be free. We cannot escape the burden of choosing by consulting a rulebook that does not exist.

Despair is not hopelessness but rather the recognition that we can only count on what lies within our power. We cannot control outcomes, other people's choices, or circumstances. What we can control is our own response, our own project. The appropriate attitude is to act without illusion about external guarantees while committing fully to one's chosen project.

Sartre's Ethics: Authenticity and Commitment

Despite declaring that values are not given but chosen, Sartre does not conclude that all choices are equivalent. Authenticity is the closest he comes to a positive ethical value: choosing in full awareness of one's freedom and responsibility, without self-deception. The authentic person does not pretend that their choices are necessitated, does not hide behind roles or conventions, and does not blame others for the life they are living.

Sartre's later work, particularly in Critique of Dialectical Reason, moved toward a more social and political philosophy influenced by Marxism. He argued that individual freedom cannot be understood in isolation from material and social conditions; oppression constrains the real freedom available to people in ways that must be changed collectively. This complicates but does not abandon his earlier emphasis on individual responsibility. The tension between radical individual freedom and social determination is never fully resolved in his work.

Beauvoir, Camus, and the Broader Movement

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's lifelong partner and a major philosopher in her own right, extended existentialist ideas into ethics and feminism. In The Second Sex (1949), she applied the concept of freedom and bad faith to analyze how women had been defined by men as the Other, denied the status of full subjects who define their own existence. She argued that both the oppressor and the oppressed can be in bad faith, and that genuine freedom requires solidarity rather than isolated individual choice.

Albert Camus explored related territory through the concept of the absurd: the confrontation between human beings' hunger for meaning and the universe's silence and indifference. His response was not Sartrean commitment but rather rebellion, continuing to live and act with full awareness of the absurd without pretending it is resolved. Camus rejected both religious faith (which he saw as philosophical suicide, papering over the absurd) and political totalitarianism (which he saw as another flight from freedom into dogma). His disagreement with Sartre over these issues became one of the famous public intellectual disputes of the 20th century.

Why Existentialism Still Matters

Existentialist ideas have permeated literature, psychology, and political thought in ways that outlasted the philosophical movement's peak in the postwar decades. Existential psychology, associated with Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Irvin Yalom, applies these ideas therapeutically, focusing on patients' confrontation with freedom, meaninglessness, isolation, and death as sources of psychological distress. Frankl's logotherapy, developed partly from his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, holds that finding meaning, even in suffering, is the central human task.

More broadly, existentialism offers a vocabulary for navigating what modern secular societies increasingly face: the absence of inherited frameworks that once provided automatic answers to questions of how to live. In a world where religious authority, traditional community, and fixed social roles have weakened, the existentialist insistence that we must choose who we are, without guarantees and without excuses, resonates with a peculiar urgency. The discomfort of that recognition is, from Sartre's perspective, exactly the starting point for an honest human life.