What Is Existentialism? Freedom, Anxiety, and Choosing Yourself

It is late, and you have two browser tabs open. One holds a job offer in a city you have always wanted to live in. The other is a message from a parent who is getting older and quietly hoping you will stay close. You ask friends, you make a pro-and-con list, you read advice columns. None of it decides for you. At some point you notice that whatever happens next, you will have chosen it. That uncomfortable moment is the home ground of existentialism. So what is existentialism, exactly? This guide walks through its key ideas, the people behind them, the best objections, and the question it leaves on your desk.

Key ideas

Existentialism is a loose family of 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, not a single school. The word itself was introduced by Gabriel Marcel in 1943.
Its best-known slogan, from Jean-Paul Sartre, is “existence precedes essence”: humans have no built-in blueprint and make themselves through their choices.
Freedom comes with full responsibility, and the feeling that goes with it is anxiety (or “anguish”).
Authenticity means owning your choices; “bad faith” is Sartre’s name for hiding from them.
Albert Camus, often filed under existentialism, rejected the label and built his own philosophy of the absurd.

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What Is Existentialism? A Family, Not a Club

If you look for an official membership list, you will be disappointed. Kevin Aho’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry notes that the term “existentialism” was introduced by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in 1943, and that it never named a coherent system. Only Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir openly called themselves existentialists. Martin Heidegger rejected the label. So did Camus.

What ties the family together is a starting point. Britannica describes existentialism as an interpretation of human existence that stresses how concrete and how problematic it is, and says the movement was most influential in continental Europe from about 1930 to the middle of the 20th century. Instead of asking “What is the nature of reality?” in the abstract, these thinkers ask: what is it like to be a particular person who has to live a life, here, now, without a script?

The family tree usually includes two 19th-century ancestors and a crowd of 20th-century heirs, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), often called the movement’s “father,” who wrote Either/Or and Fear and Trembling and insisted that truth has to be lived, not just known.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who wrote about nihilism and the “death of God” in works such as The Gay Science.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), author of Being and Time.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) and Albert Camus (1913–1960), the French writers who made the ideas famous.

A dirt road surrounded by trees — Free stock image (Unsplash)

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“Existence Precedes Essence,” Step by Step

On the evening of 29 October 1945, Sartre gave a public lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris. As philosopher Skye C. Cleary recounts in Aeon, the room was so packed that people fought for seats and fifteen of them collapsed. The talk was published in 1946 as Existentialism Is a Humanism, and it is still the most common way into the subject. Here is its central argument, broken into steps.

Think of a manufactured object. Sartre’s example is a paper-knife. Before it exists, its maker already has an idea of what it is for. Its purpose, or “essence,” comes first; the object comes second.
Some people picture humans the same way. If a creator designed us, our nature and purpose would be set before we were born.
Sartre, an atheist, denies there is such a designer. So there is no blueprint for what a human being is supposed to be.
Therefore we exist first and define ourselves afterward, through what we actually do. You are not “a coward” or “a generous person” by nature. You become one by acting.
That makes us responsible for ourselves, and, Sartre adds, each choice also sketches a picture of what he thinks a human being should be.

This is where Sartre’s famous phrase comes from: we are “condemned to be free.” We never asked to exist, yet once here we cannot hand our choices to anyone else. Even deciding whose advice to follow is a choice.

Sartre’s own illustration is a former student who came to him during the German occupation. The young man’s elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940, his father leaned toward collaboration, and his mother lived alone with him as her one consolation. He could go to England to join the Free French Forces, or stay and help her live. Christian ethics says love your neighbor, but which neighbor? Kant says treat people as ends, but both his mother and his comrades are people. Sartre’s reply, in short, was that he was free and had to choose, which meant inventing an answer no rulebook could supply. Sound familiar? It is the two-tabs problem from the top of this page.

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Anxiety, Bad Faith and Authenticity

If freedom is total, how should it feel? Existentialists answer: unsettling. Kierkegaard and Heidegger both treat anxiety as a mood that pulls you out of autopilot and makes you face the fact that your life is yours to answer for. Lecture notes from MIT’s Classics of Western Philosophy course compare Sartrean anguish to vertigo, the dizziness of standing at an edge with nothing to hold.

Most of us, most of the time, look for an exit from that feeling. Sartre calls the exit bad faith, a kind of self-deception. In Being and Nothingness (1943) he describes a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too eager, as if he were playing at being a waiter. The waiter is treating his job as a fixed nature, so that he never has to decide anything for himself. The Stanford Encyclopedia explains that bad faith can run in two directions: pretending you are nothing but your facts (your job, your past, your temperament) or pretending you are pure freedom with no past and no limits at all.

You probably know both versions. “I’m just not a morning person” can be bad faith of the first kind. “I’ll start fresh on Monday and none of this will matter” can be bad faith of the second kind. Authenticity is the alternative: seeing your situation clearly, including its limits, and owning what you make of it.

Empty chairs and tables outside a cafe building — Free stock image (Unsplash)

Term	Associated with	Plain meaning	Everyday example
Existence precedes essence	Sartre	No fixed human nature comes first; you make yourself by acting	“Brave” is something you become by doing brave things
Anxiety / anguish	Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre	The unease of realizing your choices are really yours	The dizziness of signing a lease in a new city
Bad faith	Sartre, Beauvoir	Lying to yourself to escape responsibility	“I had no choice, it’s just company policy”
Facticity	Sartre, Beauvoir	The given facts of your life: body, past, society	Your age, your birthplace, the language you grew up with
Authenticity	Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre	Owning your projects instead of drifting with the crowd	Choosing a career for reasons you can actually defend
The absurd	Camus	The clash between our demand for meaning and a world that gives no answer	Asking “what is all this for?” and hearing nothing back

Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Existentialism” and “Albert Camus”; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Existentialism.”

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Side Roads: Camus and Beauvoir

The story above runs in a straight line from Sartre’s lecture hall. Two of his closest contemporaries took it somewhere else.

Camus published The Stranger in June 1942 and The Myth of Sisyphus in October 1942. Ronald Aronson’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry describes Camus’s “absurd” as the collision between our urge to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of getting an adequate answer, the world’s “unreasonable silence.” Camus accused Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers and others of starting from the absurd and then escaping it by leaping to God or something transcendent. His own model is Sisyphus, the mythical king condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever. Camus closes the book by asking us to imagine Sisyphus happy. Many readers take this as defiance rather than resignation, though it remains one of the most argued-over endings in modern philosophy.

Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), pushed back on the word “absurd.” The Stanford Encyclopedia summarizes her point: to call life absurd is to say it can never have meaning, while to call it ambiguous is to say its meaning is never settled once and for all and must keep being won. In The Second Sex (1949) she showed how a person’s “situation,” including how society treats women, shapes what freedom is really available to them.

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The Strongest Objections

Existentialism has never lacked critics. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy collects several of the sharpest:

It ignores structures. Critics charged existentialists with neglecting social and political forces. Marxist critics, the Stanford Encyclopedia adds, pushed Sartre to move away from his early picture of radical, unconditioned freedom.
It is too inward. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that Sartre’s account of freedom looked a lot like Stoicism, retreating into the mind and ignoring how much we depend on one another.
It is unclear. Heidegger in particular was attacked as obscure by thinkers as different as Theodor Adorno and A. J. Ayer.

Existentialists did have replies. Sartre insisted his view was not nihilism: if I value my freedom, he argued, I am committed to valuing other people’s freedom too. Whether that argument works is still debated.

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Back to Your Two Tabs

So what would an existentialist say about the job offer and the parent? Not which tab to close. Sartre would say that neither tradition, nor your feelings, nor a quiz can make the decision for you, and that pretending otherwise is bad faith. Beauvoir would remind you that your situation (money, family duties, the job market) is real, not an excuse but not nothing either. Camus would add that no answer from the universe is coming.

Here is the trade-off you are left with. If you lean toward Sartre, you gain dignity: your life really is your own work. But you also lose every alibi, including “I had to.” If you lean toward Beauvoir and the critics, you get a fairer picture of how unequal freedom is, but you risk turning every limit into a reason not to choose. Where would you draw that line for yourself, tonight, with both tabs still open?

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Questions to Think About

Is there anything about you that is fixed “by nature,” or is every trait something you keep choosing?
When you say “I had no choice,” how often is that literally true?
If Sartre’s student had asked you instead, what would you have told him, and would giving advice have been a choice for which you were responsible?

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FAQ

Q: What is existentialism in simple terms?

It is the view that human beings have no pre-set purpose and must create who they are through their own choices, taking full responsibility for them.

Q: Who is the founder of existentialism?

There is no single founder. Kierkegaard is often called its father, Gabriel Marcel introduced the term in 1943, and Sartre made it famous after 1945.

Q: Is Camus an existentialist?

He is often grouped with them, but Camus rejected the label and distanced himself from Sartre’s version. His own focus was the absurd.

Q: Is existentialism the same as nihilism?

No. Existentialists deny that meaning is handed to us from outside, but most argue that we can and must create meaning and values through how we live.

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