Existentialism Explained: Sartre, Camus, and the Search for Meaning

The Historical Moment

Existentialism did not emerge in a vacuum. It crystallised in the 1940s, in a Europe that had just experienced the most comprehensive collapse of civilisational certainty in modern history. Two world wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the failure of colonial empires, and the exposure of systematic evil within supposedly civilised societies had demolished the Enlightenment confidence that human reason would inevitably produce progress, justice, and meaning.

The question that existentialism addressed was not abstract: if God is absent or silent, if progress is not guaranteed, if institutions and ideologies can be instruments of mass murder — then on what basis can a human being construct a meaningful life?

This was not a question for seminar rooms. It was a question for people who had survived occupation, resistance, collaboration, and the moral chaos of a continent at war with itself. Existentialism was philosophy for survivors.

Sartre: Radical Freedom and Bad Faith

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) is the figure most associated with existentialism, though he inherited much from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. His central claim, articulated most forcefully in Being and Nothingness (1943) and the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), can be stated simply: existence precedes essence.

What this means: a paper knife is designed before it is manufactured — its essence (purpose, function) precedes its existence (physical creation). Traditional philosophy and theology applied the same logic to humans: God or Nature designed human beings with a fixed essence — a soul, a telos, a predetermined nature — that preceded and determined their existence.

Sartre reversed this. There is no designer, no blueprint, no predetermined human nature. You exist first, and then — through your choices, actions, and commitments — you create what you are. You are not a coward because you have a cowardly nature; you are a coward because you have made cowardly choices. And you can, at any moment, choose differently.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

This freedom is not liberating in any comfortable sense. It is, in Sartre’s word, anguishing. If there is no fixed human nature, no divine commandment, no natural law that determines what you should do, then you are entirely responsible for your choices. You cannot appeal to instinct, tradition, authority, or nature to justify your actions. You chose. You are responsible.

Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre’s term for the various strategies humans use to evade this responsibility. The waiter who performs his role with mechanical precision, reducing himself to a social function. The person who says “I had no choice” when they always had a choice — they simply found the alternatives unbearable. The nationalist who subsumes individual judgment into collective identity. All are exercises in bad faith: attempts to deny the radical freedom that defines human existence.

Camus: The Absurd and the Revolt

Albert Camus (1913–1960) famously rejected the existentialist label, insisting he was not a philosopher but a writer. The distinction matters less than the ideas. Where Sartre began with freedom, Camus began with the absurd.

The absurd, in Camus’ framework, is not a property of the world. It is a relationship — the relationship between the human need for meaning, order, and purpose, and the universe’s complete indifference to those needs. We are creatures who desperately want the world to make sense, inhabiting a world that offers no inherent sense whatsoever. The collision between these two facts is the absurd.

In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus frames this as the fundamental philosophical question: given the absurd, should one commit suicide? His answer is no — but his reasoning is not consolation. He argues that acknowledging the absurd without attempting to resolve it through religious faith (which he considered “philosophical suicide”) or actual suicide is itself an act of revolt. The absurd hero lives within the tension, refusing both escape routes.

Sartre vs. Camus: The Famous Break

The intellectual friendship between Sartre and Camus ruptured publicly in 1952 over the question of political violence. Sartre, increasingly aligned with Marxism, argued that revolutionary violence could be justified as a necessary instrument of historical progress. Camus, in The Rebel (1951), argued that the logic of revolution inevitably produces new tyrannies — that the rebel who claims the right to kill in the name of justice becomes the very thing he revolted against.

The dispute was personal and bitter, conducted through published letters and reviews. But it illuminated a genuine philosophical divergence: Sartre believed that committed political action — including its violent forms — was the authentic expression of existential freedom. Camus believed that limits existed, that not everything was permitted, and that the refusal to murder was a non-negotiable boundary.

History has largely vindicated Camus. The revolutionary movements Sartre supported — Soviet communism, Maoist China, various Third World liberation projects — produced atrocities that dwarfed the injustices they claimed to correct. Camus’ insistence on moral limits within political action, dismissed as bourgeois sentimentality by the 1950s Left, reads today as prescient realism. (See: Camus and the Absurd)

De Beauvoir: Existentialism and Gender

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Sartre’s lifelong companion and an independent philosopher of the first rank, applied existentialist principles to the situation of women in The Second Sex (1949). Her famous declaration — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — is a direct application of the existentialist principle that existence precedes essence.

If there is no fixed human nature, there is no fixed female nature. The characteristics attributed to women — passivity, emotionality, domesticity — are not biological inevitabilities but social constructions. Women have been made into “the Other” — defined not by their own projects and choices but by their relationship to men and masculine norms.

De Beauvoir’s contribution extended existentialism from individual psychology to social analysis. The structures of bad faith are not only personal but institutional: societies, cultures, and political systems can operate in bad faith by treating contingent arrangements as natural facts.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: The Precursors

Though existentialism crystallised in mid-20th-century France, its roots lie in two 19th-century thinkers who shared almost nothing except the conviction that abstract philosophical systems fail to address the reality of individual human existence.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a Danish Christian, argued that the decisive questions of human life — faith, commitment, identity — cannot be resolved by reason alone. They require a “leap” — an act of will that goes beyond what evidence and argument can justify. His target was Hegel’s grand philosophical system, which claimed to encompass all of reality within a rational framework. Kierkegaard insisted that the individual, facing irreducible choices in real time, always exceeds any system.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), an atheist German, declared that “God is dead” — not as a celebration but as a diagnosis. The collapse of religious certainty, Nietzsche argued, threatened to produce nihilism: the conviction that nothing matters, that all values are arbitrary. His project was to discover whether meaning could be created after the death of God — whether humans could become, in his terms, “over-men” who generate their own values rather than inheriting them. (See: Philosophy and Society — The Great Ideas)

Existentialism Today

As a formal philosophical movement, existentialism peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. Academic philosophy moved on to structuralism, post-structuralism, analytic philosophy, and various technical specialisations. But existentialism’s core concerns have not gone away — they have, if anything, intensified.

In an age of algorithmic recommendation systems, social media identities, corporate branding of the self, and AI-generated content, the existentialist questions feel more urgent than ever: Who are you, apart from the roles you perform? What choices are genuinely yours, and which are conditioned by systems you did not design and do not control? In a world of infinite information and zero certainty, how do you commit to anything?

The existentialists did not provide comfortable answers. They insisted — and this is their lasting contribution — that the discomfort is the point. A life lived in genuine awareness of its freedom, its responsibility, and its ultimate groundlessness is not easy. But it is, in the only sense that matters, authentic.