Existentialism: Navigating the Human Condition and Freedom

What does it mean to truly exist? Not just to breathe and go about your day, but to consciously inhabit your own life – to make choices that are genuinely yours, carry their full weight, and define who you are? This is the question at the heart of existentialism. Born in the turbulence of 19th-century European thought and crystallized amid the devastation of two world wars, existentialism remains one of the most urgent and personally challenging philosophies ever developed. It does not offer comfort or a roadmap. Instead, it hands you a mirror and asks: what are you going to do with the freedom you already have?

What is existentialism? 🔗

Existentialism is not a single, tidy doctrine. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it, the movement encompasses a broad and diverse range of thinkers who nonetheless share a common preoccupation: the nature of the human condition as a key philosophical problem, best addressed by examining how we concretely live and make meaning. At its core, existentialism holds that existence precedes essence – that humans are not born with a fixed nature or predetermined purpose, but define themselves through their actions and choices.

The word “existentialism” itself was coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in 1943. When Marcel first applied the term to Jean-Paul Sartre at a colloquium in 1945, Sartre famously rejected the label – though he would go on to become its most prominent public face. The movement’s conceptual roots, however, stretch back much further, to 19th-century thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, who rejected rationalist systems of philosophy and turned instead to the raw, subjective texture of individual human experience.

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, existentialism is best understood not as a rigid school of thought but as a loose movement united by seven overlapping concerns: anxiety, authenticity, freedom, situatedness, existence, absurdity, and the tension between the individual and the crowd. These themes play out differently across different thinkers – but together they form a portrait of what it means to be human in a world without guaranteed meaning.

The pioneers: from Kierkegaard to Sartre 🔗

Understanding existentialism means tracing a lineage of thinkers who, across more than a century, steadily deepened the interrogation of individual existence.

Søren Kierkegaard: the father of existentialism 🔗

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is widely regarded as the first existentialist thinker – though he never used the term himself. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Kierkegaard did not think of the human self as a fixed metaphysical substance, but rather as an achievement – something that must be actively shaped through individual choice and commitment. For Kierkegaard, letting others decide how you live leads to what he called a life of “bloodless indolence,” devoid of genuine passion or real commitment.

Two of Kierkegaard’s most influential ideas were subjectivity – the insistence that truth is always personally lived, not objectively observed – and the famous leap of faith. For Kierkegaard, reason alone cannot resolve the deepest questions of existence. At some point, the individual must make a committed choice that transcends rational justification. This concept of choosing authentically in the face of uncertainty would echo throughout 20th-century existentialism.

Friedrich Nietzsche and the death of God 🔗

If Kierkegaard grounded existentialism in a religious framework, Friedrich Nietzsche pointed it in a more turbulent direction. His proclamation of the “death of God” was not a celebration of atheism but a diagnosis: without a transcendent moral order, humanity faces the terrifying responsibility of creating its own values. Nietzsche saw the masses as living in what he called “the herd” – conforming to inherited norms and avoiding the difficult work of genuine self-creation. His philosophy demanded courage from the individual to forge meaning independently, and it planted seeds that later existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger would cultivate in very different directions.

Jean-Paul Sartre: condemned to be free 🔗

Jean-Paul Sartre is the name most people associate with existentialism, and for good reason. Writing in post-World War II France, Sartre gave the movement its most systematic philosophical expression in Being and Nothingness (1943) and its most accessible public statement in his 1945 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. His central claim was stark: humans are “condemned to be free.” There is no divine blueprint, no fixed human nature, no external authority that can tell you who you are or what you should do. You simply are, and you must choose.

For Sartre, this radical freedom is inseparable from radical responsibility. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, when an individual makes an authentic choice, that choice does not just define the individual – it projects a set of values that any other human being in the same situation could encounter. Choosing, in this sense, is never merely a private act. Every authentic project carries a universal dimension within the singularity of a human life.

Martin Heidegger: being-toward-death 🔗

Martin Heidegger approached existentialism through the lens of ontology – the study of being itself. His concept of Dasein (being-there) referred to the distinctive mode of human existence: always situated in a particular time, place, and social world. Heidegger’s most haunting contribution was the idea of being-toward-death – the recognition that our mortality is not a distant fact but an ever-present condition that, when honestly confronted, forces us to take ownership of our existence. Recognizing that we will die, Heidegger argued, is precisely what compels us to stop drifting along with the anonymous crowd and start living as who we actually are.

Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus 🔗

Existentialism was never a exclusively male project. Simone de Beauvoir extended Sartre’s framework into feminist philosophy, arguing in The Second Sex that authenticity for women had historically been denied by a patriarchal society that imposed limiting roles, constraining their freedom to define their own identities. Her work showed that existential freedom is never purely individual – it is always entangled with the social and political structures that expand or restrict it.

Albert Camus, while often categorized alongside the existentialists, preferred the label of absurdism. For Camus, the central human drama is the tension between our deep hunger for meaning and the universe’s complete indifference to that hunger. He called this tension the absurd. Rather than resolving it through religion or despair, Camus argued we should embrace it – living fully and defiantly in spite of the universe’s silence.

Core ideas of existentialist thought 🔗

Existence precedes essence 🔗

This is the foundational claim of Sartrean existentialism, and it inverts centuries of philosophical and theological tradition. Classical philosophy held that things have an essence – a purpose or nature – before they exist. A knife is made to cut; a chair is made to support. But Sartre argued that humans have no such pre-given purpose. We are thrown into existence first, and only through the choices we make do we create any essence or identity. As Wikipedia’s overview of existentialism states, personal freedom, individual responsibility, and deliberate choice are essential to the pursuit of self-discovery and the determination of life’s meaning. You are not born a teacher, a coward, or a hero. You become one through what you do.

Freedom and responsibility 🔗

Existentialism is often romanticized as a philosophy of liberation, but its thinkers were far more sobering. Yes, you are free – radically, inescapably free. But this freedom comes with an equally radical responsibility. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, existentialists hold that a morally praiseworthy life is one where we acknowledge our freedom, take full responsibility for our choices, and act in a way that helps others realize their own freedom too. There is no hiding behind fate, upbringing, or social pressure. If you act a certain way, you have chosen to act that way – and that choice is yours to own.

Existential anxiety and dread 🔗

Recognizing the full weight of your freedom is not a pleasant experience. Existentialists describe a characteristic mood that accompanies this recognition: existential anxiety (or angst). This is not ordinary nervousness about a specific threat. It is the deeper unease that arises from realizing that no external authority – no God, no society, no tradition – can make your choices for you or relieve you of their consequences. Sartre describes this dread as the “vertigo of freedom.” Kierkegaard called it “anxiety.” Heidegger spoke of “guilt.” The words differ, but the experience is the same: the uncanny realization that you are alone in the authorship of your life.

Importantly, existentialists do not see this anxiety as something to be eliminated. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that these powerful emotional experiences – nausea, absurdity, anxiety, guilt – have the power to shake us out of complacency, collapsing the secure, familiar world and forcing us to confront the question of existence directly. Anxiety, on this view, is not a problem. It is a portal.

Authenticity and bad faith 🔗

If existential anxiety is the diagnosis, authenticity is the response. To live authentically, in existentialist terms, is to honestly confront your freedom, take ownership of your choices, and resist the pull of social conformity that would have you live according to others’ expectations rather than your own values. As the Stanford Encyclopedia defines it, an authentic life is one that courageously affirms the freedom and contingency of the human condition – lived with urgency and commitment based on the meaning-giving projects that matter to each person individually.

The opposite of authenticity is what Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi). Bad faith occurs when we deceive ourselves into thinking we have no choice – that we are simply the product of our circumstances, our roles, our biology, or society’s expectations. Sartre’s famous example is a waiter who performs his role so eagerly and completely that he denies his own individuality and freedom in the process. He is not just doing a job; he is pretending to be the job, as if he were a fixed object with no capacity to choose otherwise. This kind of self-deception, Sartre argued, is both pervasive and deeply dishonest.

Importantly, bad faith is not the same as simply following rules or fulfilling social roles. The issue is whether you acknowledge your freedom while doing so, or whether you use those roles as a way to escape the discomfort of owning your choices. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy emphasizes that Sartre’s philosophy ultimately carries a very positive message: we have immense freedom, and that freedom enables us to make authentic choices that escape the grip of self-deception.

The absurd: Camus and the indifferent universe 🔗

Albert Camus developed one of the most striking concepts in the existentialist tradition: the absurd. The absurd is not a quality of the world alone, nor of the human mind alone. It arises in the collision between the human need for clarity, meaning, and purpose, and the universe’s total silence in response to that need. We want the world to make sense. The world does not oblige.

Camus argued that there are three possible responses to the absurd: physical suicide (escaping existence entirely), philosophical suicide (leaping to religious faith to fill the silence), or revolt – living fully and consciously in the face of meaninglessness without pretending it doesn’t exist. Camus advocated revolt. His character Sisyphus – condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, watching it roll back each time – became the emblem of this attitude. We must, Camus wrote, imagine Sisyphus happy: finding meaning not in the destination, but in the struggle itself.

Existentialism and the social world 🔗

A common misreading of existentialism is that it is purely individualistic – a philosophy of solitary self-creation that has no concern for others. This is not accurate. Both Sartre and Beauvoir grappled extensively with the relationship between individual freedom and social existence. Sartre recognized that other people are not incidental to our existence – they are constitutive of it. His concept of “the gaze of the Other” explored how we often define ourselves through how we imagine others see us, which can lead to inauthenticity. But it also means that our freedom is always lived in relation to others’ freedom.

After World War II, Sartre increasingly turned from individual to social and political concerns. He argued that for individuals to realize their freedom, the structures that constrain and oppress must be confronted and transformed. Beauvoir pushed this further: she demonstrated that systemic oppression – particularly patriarchy – actively denied women the conditions necessary for authentic self-definition. Existentialism, in this reading, is not just a personal philosophy. It has direct political implications.

Why existentialism still matters 🔗

Existentialism emerged from a specific historical moment – the collapse of traditional moral frameworks, the horrors of modern warfare, the disorienting pace of industrialization. But its questions are not historical artifacts. They press against every generation with equal force.

In a world of social media, algorithmic identity, and intense conformist pressure, Sartre’s concept of bad faith is more legible than ever. When people curate online personas that bear little resemblance to their actual selves, or when they make career and life choices to satisfy external expectations rather than internal conviction, they are living out the very dynamic existentialism diagnosed. Heidegger’s being-toward-death reminds us that the awareness of our finitude – rather than being depressing – can be the sharpest stimulus to intentional living.

Existentialism also provides a framework for navigating genuine ethical difficulty. Because it rejects the idea that morality is a set of rules to be mechanically applied, it insists that each person take full responsibility for their moral choices. This is demanding, but it is also honest about the nature of ethical life – which is rarely a matter of applying algorithms, but almost always a matter of making hard choices under uncertainty, and owning the consequences.

As a philosophical analysis of Sartrean freedom published on PhilArchive notes, even if objective moral codes exist and are often useful in a prescriptive sense, human beings are ultimately free to choose their actions – and this freedom cannot be outsourced or denied without self-deception. Existentialism doesn’t let us off the hook. That, perhaps, is precisely its value.

What do you think? If existence truly precedes essence and we define ourselves entirely through our choices, does that make existential anxiety an unavoidable feature of a fully conscious human life – or is it possible to live with genuine freedom without dread? And when you look at your own decisions, how often do you find yourself acting in “bad faith” – conforming to expectations rather than your own values – and what would it take to change that?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
2. https://iep.utm.edu/existent/
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
4. https://iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
6. https://philarchive.org/archive/AKIJSE