Phenomenology and Existentialism: The Search for Authentic Individualism

What does it mean to live as a true individual? This question has haunted Western philosophy for centuries, but it found its most forceful expression in two interconnected movements: phenomenology and existentialism. At the heart of both lies a radical claim – that the individual’s lived experience matters more than abstract systems, universal rules, or societal expectations. Two thinkers stand out in this tradition: Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher often called the father of existentialism, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the 20th-century French thinker who brought existentialism into the global spotlight. Together, their ideas form a powerful philosophical argument for authentic individualism – one that begins with personal truth and confronts the unavoidable tension between self and society.

Kierkegaard’s subjective truth: the individual against the system 🔗

Søren Kierkegaard wrote at a time when European philosophy was dominated by the grand systematic thinking of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy aimed to explain everything – history, nature, spirit – through a single rational system. Kierkegaard found this approach deeply unsatisfying. His core objection was simple but revolutionary: no abstract system, no matter how logically complete, can capture what it actually means to exist as a living, feeling individual.

In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard made his most famous and provocative claim: “subjectivity is truth.” This statement is easy to misunderstand. He was not saying that facts don’t matter or that anyone can believe whatever they want. Rather, he argued that truth becomes genuinely meaningful only when it is personally appropriated – when a person relates to it inwardly, with passion and commitment.

What “subjectivity is truth” actually means 🔗

For Kierkegaard, there is a crucial difference between knowing something objectively and living it subjectively. You can, for instance, know all the facts about mortality – that every human being dies, that life is finite. But knowing this as an abstract fact is entirely different from truly reckoning with the reality of your own death. The first is mere information; the second transforms how you live. As Kierkegaard noted in his journals, his philosophical mission was to find a truth that was personally meaningful – not just something to know, but something for which he could live and die.

This is what he meant by subjective truth. Objective knowledge – science, logic, historical research – has its place. But the truths that shape a human life, the ones involving ethical commitment, religious faith, and personal identity, require something more. They require passionate inwardness, a total engagement of the self. A person who can recite all the doctrines of Christianity but lives without any genuine faith has, in Kierkegaard’s view, missed the truth entirely.

The three stages of existence 🔗

Kierkegaard described human life as moving through what he called three stages on life’s way: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Each represents a different relationship between the individual and truth.

In the aesthetic stage, a person lives for immediate pleasure and sensory experience. Life is about novelty, enjoyment, and avoiding boredom. But this mode of existence eventually leads to despair, because pleasure is fleeting and fails to provide lasting meaning.

The ethical stage involves commitment – to duties, relationships, and moral principles. A person in this stage lives according to universal rules and social expectations. It represents a higher form of existence than the aesthetic, but Kierkegaard believed it still falls short because it subordinates the individual to general, impersonal standards.

The religious stage is where the individual stands alone before God, making a personal commitment that cannot be justified by reason or society. This is the realm of Kierkegaard’s famous leap of faith – a decision made in the face of objective uncertainty, driven entirely by passionate conviction. The movement from one stage to the next is not a logical progression; it requires a radical personal choice.

The individual against “the crowd” 🔗

Kierkegaard was deeply suspicious of what he called “the crowd.” He believed that mass society encourages people to hide behind collective opinions, follow trends, and avoid the difficult work of self-examination. When people defer to “what everyone thinks,” they abandon their individuality. For Kierkegaard, genuine action must always arise from the individual, without relying on the agreement or support of others. The crowd, he insisted, is always wrong when it comes to matters of personal truth and ethical commitment.

This emphasis on the solitary individual was not about selfishness or isolation. It was about taking personal responsibility. You cannot outsource your relationship with truth to a committee, a political party, or a social media algorithm. Each person must confront existence on their own terms.

Anxiety and the burden of freedom 🔗

Kierkegaard also made a critical contribution to understanding human psychology with his analysis of anxiety (Angst). In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), he described anxiety not as a response to a specific threat but as the feeling that arises from confronting the sheer openness of human freedom. When you stand at the edge of a cliff, you fear falling – but you also feel a terrifying awareness that you could choose to jump. That dizzying awareness of your own freedom is what Kierkegaard meant by anxiety.

This insight was foundational for later existentialist thinkers. Freedom is not a comfortable gift; it is a burden. The fact that we must choose, and that nothing guarantees we will choose rightly, produces a deep unease that no amount of rational planning can eliminate. For Kierkegaard, even religious faith offers no lasting relief – faith itself is a continuous act of will, not a settled state of certainty.

Sartre and the Other: conflict at the heart of existence 🔗

If Kierkegaard placed the individual before God, Jean-Paul Sartre placed the individual before other people – and found the encounter deeply troubling. Sartre’s major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), is a massive phenomenological investigation of human consciousness, freedom, and social relationships. Where Kierkegaard’s individualism was rooted in religious commitment, Sartre’s was radically secular. His starting point was that human beings have no predetermined essence or nature. We are, as he famously put it, “condemned to be free.”

Existence precedes essence 🔗

Sartre’s most well-known principle is that existence precedes essence. A hammer has an essence before it exists – someone designs it with a purpose in mind. But human beings are not like that. We come into existence first, and only then do we define ourselves through our choices and actions. There is no human nature that determines what we must be; we create ourselves continuously.

This sounds liberating, and in a sense it is. But Sartre saw that it also produces anguish. If nothing determines who you are, then you are entirely responsible for everything you become. There are no excuses – not upbringing, not circumstances, not society. Every choice is yours, and every choice defines you.

The Look and the problem of the Other 🔗

One of Sartre’s most original contributions is his analysis of how other people affect our sense of self. In Being and Nothingness, he describes what he calls “the Look” (le regard) – the experience of being seen by another person. Sartre illustrates this with a vivid thought experiment: you are peering through a keyhole, fully absorbed in what you are doing. At that moment, you are pure consciousness directed outward. Then you hear footsteps behind you. Someone is watching. Suddenly, you become aware of yourself as an object in someone else’s world. You feel shame, self-consciousness, exposure.

For Sartre, this moment reveals something fundamental about human relationships. When another person looks at you, they transform you from a free subject into a fixed object. They assign you characteristics, judge you, categorize you. Your fluid, open sense of self collapses into a thing with properties – shy, clumsy, guilty, attractive. The Other’s gaze, as Sartre saw it, threatens your freedom by reducing you to a static identity.

This is the deeper meaning behind Sartre’s famous line from his play No Exit: “Hell is other people.” He did not mean that other people are annoying. He meant that we can never fully control how others perceive us, and their perception has the power to define and limit who we are. Every encounter between two conscious beings becomes, in some sense, a struggle between freedoms – each person trying to assert their subjectivity while the other’s gaze turns them into an object.

Bad faith: the flight from freedom 🔗

Sartre’s concept of bad faith (mauvaise foi) is central to his philosophy of authentic individualism. Bad faith occurs when a person deceives themselves about the nature of their own freedom. It is not the same as lying to someone else; in bad faith, the liar and the one being lied to are the same person.

Sartre’s most famous example is the waiter in a café. The waiter moves with exaggerated precision, interacts with customers with rehearsed eagerness, and performs every gesture as though he were a mechanism. He is not simply doing his job – he is playing at being a waiter. He has collapsed his entire identity into a social role, convincing himself that this is all he is. In doing so, he denies his freedom to be anything else.

But bad faith is not limited to waiters. It appears whenever people tell themselves they “have no choice,” that they “must” behave a certain way because of their job, their family, their culture, or their past. For Sartre, all of these are forms of self-deception. You always have a choice. Even refusing to choose is itself a choice. Living a life defined entirely by one’s occupation, social class, or other external category is, as Sartre saw it, the very essence of bad faith – a failure to recognize that we are always more than any fixed identity.

Authenticity: the existentialist ideal 🔗

If bad faith is the disease, authenticity is the cure – though Sartre acknowledged it is never fully achieved. To live authentically means to accept that you are radically free, that your choices define you, and that no external authority can relieve you of that responsibility. It means refusing to hide behind roles, labels, or social expectations.

For Kierkegaard, authenticity meant standing alone before the ultimate questions of existence – embracing the anxiety of freedom rather than numbing it with conformity. For Sartre, it meant acknowledging both your freedom and your facticity (the concrete circumstances of your life) without collapsing into either. You are not just your past, your body, or your social position; but neither are you a disembodied will floating free of all constraints. Authentic living, for both thinkers, is a continuous process, not a destination.

Sartre later refined his view to acknowledge that authenticity also involves recognizing the freedom of others. In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), he argued that when we choose for ourselves, we choose for all of humanity. Every value we affirm through our actions implicitly says: this is how a human being should live. This introduces an ethical dimension that connects the individual back to the wider human community – not through obedience to rules, but through the weight of personal responsibility.

From Kierkegaard to Sartre: a shared legacy 🔗

Despite their significant differences – Kierkegaard was a devout Christian, Sartre an atheist; Kierkegaard wrote in 19th-century Copenhagen, Sartre in occupied Paris – these two thinkers share a common conviction. Both believed that philosophy had become too abstract, too focused on systems and theories, and too disconnected from the lived reality of individual human beings. Both insisted that the most important philosophical questions are not about the structure of the universe but about how each person chooses to live.

Their combined legacy is a philosophy that refuses to let the individual disappear into the crowd, the system, or the role. It is a philosophy that takes seriously the anxiety, the responsibility, and the exhilarating possibility of being a self in a world that offers no guarantees.

What do you think? Is total authenticity truly possible, or are we always performing some role for others? And if Sartre is right that other people’s perceptions inevitably limit our freedom, can we ever fully escape “bad faith” in a deeply social world?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concluding_Unscientific_Postscript_to_Philosophical_Fragments
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
5. http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5t.htm
6. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
7. https://iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/
8. https://philosophybreak.com/articles/sartre-waiter-bad-faith-and-the-harms-of-inauthenticity/
9. https://philosophynow.org/issues/53/Sartres_Being_and_Nothingness_The_Bible_of_Existentialism
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness