Existentialism and the Essence of Being Human

What does it mean to be human? For centuries, philosophers tried to answer this by defining human nature in advance – as rational animal, as soul imprisoned in body, as creature made in God’s image. Existentialism took a radically different path. It argued that there is no pre-packaged human nature waiting to be discovered. Instead, the human being is a work in progress, defined entirely by living, choosing, and taking responsibility. This shift – from essence to existence – is one of the most profound moves in the history of philosophy, and it changes everything about how we understand ourselves.

The core claim: existence precedes essence 🔗

The central principle of existentialism is captured in a single, deceptively simple phrase: existence precedes essence. Associated most famously with the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the idea is that human beings exist first – we are thrown into the world – and only afterward do we define who we are through our choices and actions. This stands in sharp contrast to the classical view, which held that human beings have a fixed nature or purpose given to them by God, reason, or biology before they ever act.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, recognizing that there is no pre-given essence that determines human existence means it is entirely up to the individual to forge their own identity through choices and actions. Sartre illustrated this with a pointed example: a coward is not a coward because of genetics or upbringing – the coward makes himself a coward through his own decisions. This is not a pessimistic view but a liberating one. It places the authorship of human life squarely in the hands of the individual.

Existentialism as a movement was not merely interested in abstract metaphysical questions. It asked what truly matters in human life, what shapes and influences it, and how those factors bear on our ethical choices. Its intellectual roots stretch back to Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, but it crystallized as a distinct philosophical movement in 20th-century Europe, particularly in the work of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Martin Heidegger.

Key existentialist thinkers and their contributions 🔗

Kierkegaard: subjective truth and the existing individual 🔗

Søren Kierkegaard is widely regarded as the first existentialist thinker, even though the label was coined long after his death. His target was the grand philosophical system of G.W.F. Hegel, which Kierkegaard believed had reduced the individual to a mere cog in a vast rational machine. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Kierkegaard argued that Hegel’s system “makes the subject accidental, and thereby transforms existence into something indifferent, something vanishing.” Against this, Kierkegaard insisted that subjective truth – one’s own lived engagement with existence – is the highest truth attainable for a human being. Philosophy must begin not from a detached, abstract vantage point but from the deeply personal experience of existing.

Heidegger: Dasein and being-in-the-world 🔗

Martin Heidegger approached human existence through his concept of Dasein, a German word meaning “being there.” Rather than treating the human person as a mind housed inside a body, Heidegger conceived of human beings as fundamentally and inseparably embedded in the world. As Encyclopaedia Britannica explains, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein represents a genuine alternative to both the body-and-soul conception of human being and the purely materialist reduction of a person to their body. It treats the human individual as a whole, refusing to segregate the “mental” from the “physical.”

For Heidegger, human existence is always being-in-the-world – not a subject peering at an external reality, but an active participant who is already engaged, caring, interpreting. Heidegger’s existential framework stresses that the fundamental question for human existence is not simply “What am I?” but “How am I to be in the world?” This framing dissolves the old Cartesian separation between the thinking self and the external world. We do not stand apart from our world and observe it – we are always already in it, shaped by it, and shaping it.

Heidegger also introduced the idea of authenticity. An authentic existence, for Heidegger, means taking ownership of one’s own being rather than drifting anonymously in what he called das Man – the “They,” the faceless crowd of social conformity. Inauthentic Dasein forfeits individual meaning and destiny by dissolving into the public, average world. Authentic existence, by contrast, requires confronting the fact that each of us is uniquely and irreplaceably responsible for our own life.

Sartre: radical freedom and the burden of choice 🔗

No thinker pushed the existentialist account of human freedom further than Sartre. His philosophy begins from the idea that human consciousness – what he called being-for-itself – is fundamentally different from the being of mere objects. Unlike a stone, which simply is what it is, a human being is self-aware, able to reflect on itself and step back from any given situation. This self-awareness is the root of freedom. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, both freedom and responsibility in existentialism are absolute – there is nothing else that acts through the individual, and nothing else that shoulders their responsibility.

This freedom, however, is not a gift. Sartre describes us as “condemned to be free” – we cannot escape choosing, because even refusing to choose is itself a choice. Since there is no objective moral order, no divine blueprint, no natural law to guide us, the individual bears the full weight of every decision. Moreover, Sartre extends this responsibility outward: when we choose for ourselves, we implicitly choose a model of what a human being ought to do. Our actions have universal implications – a point that gives existentialist ethics a surprisingly social dimension despite its focus on the individual.

Beauvoir: freedom, ambiguity, and the ethics of existence 🔗

Simone de Beauvoir extended existentialist ethics into a more explicitly social and political terrain. She insisted that authentic existence is not merely a private project but one that is bound up with the freedom of others. To live authentically is to recognize what she called the fundamental ambiguity of human existence – we are neither purely free nor purely determined, neither isolated selves nor simply products of society. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, for Beauvoir, authentic existence means accepting this ambiguity and recognizing that genuine freedom cannot be realized by one person alone while others remain oppressed.

Rejecting the body-soul divide 🔗

One of existentialism’s most enduring contributions is its critique of the traditional body-soul dualism inherited from Descartes and, before him, Plato. The Cartesian picture held that a human being is essentially a thinking mind – res cogitans – that merely happens to inhabit a physical body – res extensa. The body, on this view, is something the soul uses rather than something the person fundamentally is.

Existentialist phenomenology dismantled this picture. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the leading French phenomenologist of the post-war period, argued that the body is not an instrument controlled by a separate mind but the very medium through which we engage with reality. As the Open University summarizes his position, the body is “the vehicle of being in the world” – integral to perception and to any understanding of human experience.

Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived body (as distinct from the mere biological organism) challenged the stimulus-response model of human behavior and insisted that our bodily existence is the ground of all meaning-making. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, he argued that the significance of the body is routinely underestimated by a philosophical tradition that treats it simply as an object the mind orders around. For Merleau-Ponty, perception itself is an ongoing dialogue between the lived body and the world – not a purely mental event.

Heidegger made a parallel move. Rather than describing Dasein as a mind that has a body, Heidegger describes Dasein as bodily – the body is not an object attached to a subject but is part of the very structure of being-in-the-world. This shift from “having a body” to “being bodily” has significant consequences: it means that the traditional philosophical problem of how mind and body interact simply dissolves. There was never a separated mind needing to connect with a body. There was always already a unified human being, embedded in a world of practical engagement.

Freedom, facticity, and the making of meaning 🔗

Existentialism does not claim that human beings are free in an absolute, unconditioned sense. Every person is thrown into existence – born into a particular body, culture, historical moment, and set of circumstances they did not choose. Heidegger calls this facticity. We cannot simply choose to be other than what our situation makes us. What we can do – and what we cannot avoid doing – is take a stand on that situation, respond to it, make something of it.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies this as the key tension in existentialist thought: human beings have facticity (the given conditions of their lives) and transcendence (the capacity to project themselves beyond those conditions through choice). Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty worked toward what they called situated freedom – the idea that choice is always embedded in, and shaped by, a specific social and historical context, yet is never simply determined by it.

This account of freedom generates the existentialist conception of anxiety or angst. When we become fully aware of our freedom, we realize that no external authority – no God, no nature, no tradition – can make our choices for us or relieve us of responsibility for them. As Wikipedia’s overview of existentialism notes, anxiety in this sense arises from the experience of being fully responsible for decisions whose outcomes are never guaranteed. Rather than suppressing this anxiety, existentialists urge us to face it honestly and use it as a spur to genuine self-authorship.

Authenticity and the quest for meaning 🔗

What unites the major existentialist thinkers, despite their considerable differences, is the insistence that a genuinely human life requires authenticity – living in honest acknowledgment of one’s freedom and responsibility rather than hiding behind social roles, habit, or self-deception. Sartre called inauthentic existence bad faith (mauvaise foi): treating oneself as a fixed thing with a determined nature, saying “I had no choice” when in fact a choice was made, or simply going along with what “one does” without ever owning that conformity as a choice.

Authenticity does not mean withdrawing from society or living in heroic isolation. It means engaging with the world, with others, and with one’s own existence from a position of honest self-awareness. As The Philosopher notes, existentialism has remained compelling for over 75 years precisely because people continue to recognize in it a vivid description of their own consciousness – its freedoms, its burdens, and the way meaning must be made rather than found ready-made.

The quest for meaning, in existentialist terms, is not a search for some pre-existing answer hidden in the universe. It is an ongoing, active project – one that is inseparable from the choices that constitute a human life. To exist as a human being, on this account, is already to be engaged in that project, whether or not one acknowledges it.

What do you think? If there is no fixed human nature and we define ourselves entirely through our choices, does that make life more meaningful or more burdensome? And is it truly possible to live authentically – owning every choice as genuinely one’s own – in a world so thoroughly shaped by social pressures, cultural norms, and circumstances beyond our control?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
2. https://www.playforthoughts.com/blog/existentialism
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dasein
4. https://sweetinstitute.com/martin-heidegger-and-existential-therapy-understanding-being-and-embracing-authentic-existence/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein
6. https://iep.utm.edu/existent/
7. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/society-politics-law/sociology/the-body-phenomenological-psychological-perspective/content-section-3.1
8. https://iep.utm.edu/merleau/
9. https://www.academia.edu/15370935/Being_and_Body_Martin_Heidegger_and_Maurice_Merleau-Ponty
10. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/existentialism/v-1/sections/freedom-and-responsibility
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
12. https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/beyond-free-will