What Is Existentialism? Freedom, Authenticity, and the Absurd

The Core Claim: Existence Precedes Essence

Jean-Paul Sartre's phrase existence precedes essence captures the defining insight of existentialism. Traditional philosophy and theology held that human beings have a fixed nature or essence — a purpose built into them by God or by nature — that precedes and defines their existence. Existentialism inverts this: human beings first exist, thrown into the world without purpose, and only then create their own essence through the choices they make.

This is both liberating and terrifying. There is no predetermined human nature to guide us, no cosmic plan to fall back on. We are, as Sartre put it, condemned to be free. Every moment demands a choice, and every choice reveals the person we are becoming. This radical freedom carries radical responsibility: we cannot blame our actions on nature, God, or circumstance. We are the authors of ourselves.

Kierkegaard and Heidegger: Proto-Existentialist Roots

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), often called the first existentialist, reacted against Hegel's grand systematic philosophy, insisting that abstract systems cannot capture the irreducible particularity of individual human existence. Kierkegaard described three stages of existence: the aesthetic stage (pursuing pleasure and novelty), the ethical stage (accepting duty and moral commitment), and the religious stage (a leap of faith beyond rational justification into relationship with God).

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) brought existentialist themes into academic philosophy through his monumental 1927 work Being and Time. Heidegger analyzed the structure of human existence — which he called Dasein (being-there) — as fundamentally characterized by thrownness (being cast into a world we did not choose), projection (always orienting toward future possibilities), and fallenness (the tendency to lose ourselves in social conformity and the anonymous "they-self"). Authentic existence requires owning up to our thrownness and facing death as our ownmost, non-relational possibility.

Sartre: Freedom, Bad Faith, and the Other

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) is the most prominent existentialist. In Being and Nothingness (1943), he argued that human consciousness is characterized by nothingness — the capacity to negate any given situation and imagine alternatives. This capacity is the source of freedom, and freedom is inescapable: even refusing to choose is a choice.

Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre's term for the self-deception by which people deny their own freedom. The waiter who performs his role with exaggerated precision, as if being a waiter were his entire nature, is in bad faith — he pretends he is a thing with a fixed essence rather than a free being who has chosen to be a waiter. Similarly, those who claim they "had no choice" typically do have choices, but prefer to deny responsibility for them.

Sartre also analyzed intersubjectivity through the concept of the look (le regard). When another person looks at me, I become an object in their world, defined and limited by their gaze. This creates the fundamental tension of human relations: each consciousness seeks to dominate or escape the objectifying look of the other. His play No Exit dramatizes this with the line "Hell is other people."

Camus and Absurdism

Albert Camus (1913–1960) is associated with absurdism, a closely related but distinct position. Camus identified the absurd as the confrontation between the human desire for meaning and the universe's silence on the matter. We hunger for clarity, purpose, and connection; the world offers none. The absurd is this gap, this fundamental mismatch.

In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus examined three possible responses to the absurd: physical suicide (rejecting life), philosophical suicide (embracing religion or ideology to escape the problem), and rebellion (accepting the absurd and continuing to live fully despite it). Camus advocated rebellion. We must imagine Sisyphus happy: condemned eternally to roll his boulder up a hill only to watch it fall, he finds meaning in the struggle itself, not in any goal the struggle serves.

Camus rejected Sartre's existentialism partly because he distrusted the political commitments it seemed to demand, particularly Sartre's sympathy toward Marxism. Their famous falling-out over Camus's The Rebel illustrated real tensions between absurdism's individualism and existentialism's political engagement.

Authenticity and Bad Faith in Everyday Life

The concept of authenticity runs through all existentialist thought: the injunction to live in accordance with your own freely chosen values rather than drifting into conformity with social expectations. Heidegger called inauthentic existence das Man — the anonymous "one does this" mode of being, in which we never confront our own mortality and freedom but lose ourselves in the crowd.

Authenticity does not mean selfishness or indifference to others. Sartre argued that in choosing for myself I choose for all humanity, since my choices implicitly assert values I think everyone should hold. Authentic existence requires acknowledging both my freedom and my responsibility for the kind of world my choices help create.

Simone de Beauvoir applied these ideas to feminism in The Second Sex (1949), arguing that women have been systematically encouraged into bad faith — defining themselves through their relationships to men rather than as free subjects. Authentic existence for women requires resisting the social construction of femininity and claiming full subjectivity.

Existentialism's Legacy in Psychology and Culture

Existentialism profoundly influenced psychology, particularly through existential psychotherapy. Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, developed partly in response to his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and detailed in Man's Search for Meaning (1946), holds that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power but the will to meaning. Irvin Yalom identified four ultimate concerns — death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness — as the central concerns of existential therapy.

Rollo May brought existentialist ideas into American psychology, analyzing anxiety not as a symptom to be eliminated but as the inevitable accompaniment of freedom and growth. These approaches emphasize the patient's capacity to choose their response to any situation, however constrained.

In literature, existentialist themes shaped the novels of Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, and countless postwar writers. Films from The Seventh Seal to Blade Runner engage existentialist questions about meaning, mortality, and identity. Existentialism's insistence that meaning must be created rather than discovered — and that this task falls to each individual — remains one of the most challenging and resonant ideas in modern thought.