Existentialism: Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus

Where We Are

Kierkegaard had insisted on the existing individual against the System (Lesson 32); Husserl had given a method for describing lived experience (Lesson 43); Heidegger had analyzed thrown, anxious, mortal existence (Lesson 44). In occupied and postwar Paris, a circle of writers fused these inheritances into the most famous philosophy of the twentieth century — and took it out of the seminar room into the cafés, the novels, the theater, and the Resistance. Existentialism made philosophy a matter of how to live in a world without God or given meaning, where each person is radically free and therefore radically responsible. For a generation it was not just a doctrine but a mood, a style, a way of being young and serious after the catastrophe. This lesson follows its great trio — Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus — and the ethics of the Other that answered them.

The Historical Moment

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) met as students, became lifelong partners in an open and intellectually fused relationship, and together made the Café de Flore a philosophical headquarters. Sartre — playwright, novelist, philosopher, and political activist who would refuse the Nobel Prize — produced the movement's dense masterwork, Being and Nothingness (1943), under German occupation. Albert Camus (1913–1960), a working-class pied-noir from Algeria, novelist and Resistance editor, shared the mood but resisted the label, and would break bitterly with Sartre over communism. Their existentialism was forged in a specific furnace: a continent where God seemed dead, traditional values had produced the trenches and the camps, and each person had recently faced stark choices — collaborate or resist, with their life in the balance. The question "how shall I live, with no authority to tell me?" was not academic.

Existence Precedes Essence

Sartre compressed the whole philosophy into a slogan. For a manufactured object — a paper-knife — the essence comes first: the maker has the concept and purpose in mind before the thing exists. Traditional philosophy and religion treated human beings the same way, as made by God or Nature to a prior specification, with a fixed "human nature" and purpose. Sartre denies it. There is no God and no blueprint; the human being simply exists first, thrown into the world, and only afterward, through choices and actions, makes itself something:

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards. ... Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946 (our close rendering)

Existence precedes essence: we are not anything in particular until we make ourselves so, and there is no human nature to appeal to as an excuse. Each of us is wholly responsible for what we become — and, Sartre adds, in choosing for ourselves we implicitly affirm an image of what a human being should be, so that in choosing myself I "choose for all mankind." The weight is total and inescapable.

Condemned to Be Free

This freedom is not a gift but a sentence. Because there is no God, no fixed values, no human nature, nothing whatsoever determines what I must do; I cannot hand the decision to any authority, rule, or role, because choosing to obey one is itself my free choice. Sartre's phrase is deliberately paradoxical:

Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet ... thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946 (our close rendering)

We are "condemned" to freedom: we cannot escape it, and the awareness of it is anguish. So we are forever tempted into bad faith (mauvaise foi) — the lie we tell ourselves to flee our freedom by pretending we are things with fixed natures and no choice. Sartre's immortal example is the café waiter whose movements are a shade too precise, too eager, too perfectly "waiter-like": he is playing at being a waiter, trying to coincide completely with the role, to be a waiter the way an inkwell is an inkwell — and thereby disowning the free consciousness that could, at any moment, do otherwise. The coward who says "I am just a coward, that is my nature," the bigot who pleads "that's just how I was raised," anyone who hides behind "I had no choice" — all are in bad faith, fleeing the vertigo of a freedom that never lets go.

The Look and the Other

But I am not alone in my freedom, and other people complicate it absolutely. Sartre's analysis of the Look (le regard) is one of his greatest contributions. When another person looks at me, I am suddenly aware of myself as an object in their world, fixed and judged by a freedom I do not control — caught, say, peering through a keyhole, I feel shame the instant I am seen, transformed from a pure looking-consciousness into a "peeper," a thing with a nature for the other. The other steals my world and pins me down. Human relations, for Sartre, are therefore a perpetual struggle between freedoms, each trying to make the other an object or to possess the other's freedom — a conflict dramatized in his play No Exit, whose three damned characters torment one another simply by looking and judging, and which gave the world its most quoted line about other people:

Hell is other people.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, 1944 (our close rendering)

The line is not misanthropy but philosophy: it means that we depend on others for our very sense of who we are, and so are perpetually vulnerable to being fixed, defined, and condemned by their gaze.

Beauvoir: One Is Not Born a Woman

Simone de Beauvoir was a profound existentialist philosopher in her own right, long underrated as merely Sartre's companion — a distortion the course names as part of the pattern (Lesson 53). In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) she did what Sartre had postponed, building an actual existentialist ethics: since my freedom is realized only among others, I am obliged to will the freedom of others along with my own, and oppression is precisely the denial of others' freedom. Then, in The Second Sex (1949), she turned existentialism into the founding text of modern feminist philosophy. Woman, she argued, has been constructed throughout history as the Other — defined always in relation to man, who is the norm, the Subject, the One, while woman is the deviation, the object, the second sex. And crucially, this is not biological destiny but a social making:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. ... It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949 (our close rendering)

The distinction between being born female and being made "a woman" — between sex and the cultural role of gender — is one of the most consequential ideas in modern thought. Applying Sartre's freedom and Hegel's master–slave dialectic (Lesson 31), Beauvoir showed how women have been induced into a kind of collective bad faith, accepting the immanence and dependence assigned to them instead of claiming the freedom and transcendence that are theirs by right. The Second Sex launched second-wave feminism and everything in Lesson 53.

Camus: The Absurd and Revolt

Albert Camus shared the godless universe but drew a different conclusion, gentler and in some ways braver. His theme is the absurd: the collision between the human craving for meaning, clarity, and justice, and a universe that offers none — silent, indifferent, irrational. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by naming the stakes with startling directness — "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide": if life has no meaning, why go on? Camus's answer is to refuse both suicide and the "philosophical suicide" of a consoling leap to God or to some grand system. We must instead live with the absurd, in lucid, defiant revolt — neither pretending the universe makes sense nor surrendering to despair, but wringing a fierce happiness from life precisely because it is all there is. His image is the mythical Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill forever, watching it roll back down each time:

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942 (our close rendering)

In his later The Rebel (1951), Camus extended this into an ethic of revolt that set limits against the murderous logic of revolution: "I rebel, therefore we exist" — the rebel who says "no" to oppression affirms a shared human dignity and a line that must not be crossed, even, Camus insisted against Sartre and the communists, in the name of a future utopia. The break it caused between the two men was one of the great quarrels of the century.

The Other as Ethics: Levinas

A final voice answered existentialism's combat of freedoms with an ethics of obligation. Drawing on Husserl and Heidegger but turning sharply against them, and on the Jewish tradition of Martin Buber — whose I and Thou (1923) had distinguished the reducing, using stance of "I–It" from the genuine encounter of "I–Thou" — Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) made the encounter with the Other the foundation of everything. Where Sartre saw the other's look as a threat, Levinas saw the other's face as a summons. The face of another person, in its very vulnerability and expressiveness, addresses me before I choose anything, commanding me — thou shalt not kill — and calling me to an infinite, asymmetrical responsibility that I did not contract and cannot discharge:

The face resists possession, resists my powers. ... The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised.

— Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961 (our close rendering)

For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy — prior to metaphysics, prior even to ontology — because the claim of the Other on me is the most fundamental fact of human existence, more basic than freedom, knowledge, or being. After a century of treating others as means, as objects, as resources, and as enemies, Levinas relocated the ground of philosophy in responsibility for the other person.

Legacy: Who Listened

Existentialism was the last philosophy to be a genuine popular movement, shaping literature, theater, film, theology, and psychology, and giving the postwar world its vocabulary of authenticity, anguish, freedom, and bad faith. Its deepest legacy runs through Beauvoir: The Second Sex is the foundation of modern feminist philosophy, and its distinction between sex and gender, and its analysis of woman as Other, structure the entire field (Lesson 53). Through Sartre and Hegel's master–slave dialectic, existentialism shaped Frantz Fanon's analysis of colonialism and race (Lesson 53), and through Sartre's later turn it fused with Marxism in the New Left. Camus's lucid, humane confrontation with the absurd, and his refusal of revolutionary murder, made him a moral touchstone whose stock has only risen. And Levinas's ethics of the face became one of the most influential strands of late-twentieth-century thought, shaping Derrida (Lesson 48), theology, and the ethics of care and vulnerability. The existentialists insisted that philosophy must answer the question each person actually faces — what shall I do with my freedom, here, now, with no one to tell me? — and in a century that had shown what human beings will do, they made that question impossible to evade.

Threads

The course-long questions this lesson moves forward.

What the self is — The self has no fixed essence: existence precedes essence, and we make ourselves through free choices, forever tempted into bad faith — the denial of a freedom we cannot escape; with Beauvoir, "woman" is shown to be made, not born.
Who counts morally — Beauvoir exposes woman's construction as the Other and grounds an ethics of liberating others' freedom; Levinas makes the face of the Other, and infinite responsibility for them, the foundation of ethics itself.
Faith and reason — In a universe without God or given meaning, Sartre demands we own our freedom, Camus that we live in lucid revolt against the absurd, and Levinas that we find the absolute not in being but in the ethical claim of the other person.
The just society — Beauvoir's analysis of oppression as the denial of freedom, and Camus's ethic of revolt with limits against revolutionary murder, turn existentialist freedom toward politics and the defense of human dignity.

Reflection Questions

Sartre says we are "condemned to be free" — that even hiding behind a role, a rule, or "I had no choice" is itself a free choice in bad faith. Is he right that we can never genuinely escape responsibility for what we do, or are there real limits — circumstance, conditioning, coercion — that his radical freedom ignores?
Beauvoir says "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" — that the social role is made, not given by biology. How far does this go? Which features of gender (or of any social identity) are constructed and which, if any, are not — and how would you tell the difference?
Camus says that if the universe is meaningless we must imagine Sisyphus, eternally rolling his boulder, happy. Is lucid revolt against the absurd — neither suicide nor a leap to false consolation — a livable response to a world without given meaning, or a heroic pose? What would make a meaningless task worth doing with a full heart?

Self-Check Quiz

What does Sartre mean by "existence precedes essence"?
- A. That each person's nature is fixed in advance by their soul, so that a human being's character is already settled at birth and is merely discovered later
- B. That the fact of being alive matters more than reasoning, so that philosophers should give up abstract argument in favor of direct experience of life
- C. That human beings have no fixed, pre-given nature or purpose; we first exist, and then make ourselves what we are through our free choices
- D. That a person's character is the product of social class and historical conditions, which settle what each individual will become
What is "bad faith" in Sartre's sense?
- A. The pretense of virtue by someone who claims moral standards they do not actually follow, hiding self-interest behind public principles that others are expected to admire
- B. The betrayal of a trust or promise, by which a person deliberately deceives another and so treats that person as a means rather than as a free subject with claims of their own
- C. The holding of a belief with more confidence than the evidence supports, a failure of intellectual honesty that Sartre blames on laziness in reasoning and a refusal to examine one's grounds
- D. The self-deception by which we flee our freedom, pretending to be fixed things with no choice — like the waiter who tries to be a waiter, or the person who says "that's just my nature"
Explain Beauvoir's claim that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," and why the distinction it draws has been so influential.
What is "the absurd" for Camus, and what response does he recommend instead of suicide or a leap to religious or systematic consolation?
Beauvoir analyzes woman as "the Other" using a dialectic from Lesson 31. Whose master–slave dialectic does she apply, and how does casting woman as the inessential Other to man's essential Subject illuminate both the mechanism of oppression and the path out of it?

Show answers

C — "Existence precedes essence" means there is no pre-given human nature or divine blueprint determining what a person must be; the human being first exists, thrown into the world, and only afterward defines itself through its choices and actions. We are nothing but what we make of ourselves, and so are wholly responsible for it.
D — Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is the self-deception by which we flee the anguish of our freedom, pretending to be fixed objects with determinate natures and no real choice. Sartre's example is the waiter who plays so completely at being a waiter that he tries to coincide with the role and disown the free consciousness that could always do otherwise; likewise anyone who excuses themselves with "that is just my nature" or "I had no choice."
Beauvoir means that "woman" — the feminine role, with its expected passivity, dependence, and immanence — is not determined by being born biologically female but is produced by a whole civilization of upbringing, expectation, myth, and social structure. The distinction (between being born female and being made "a woman") separates biological sex from the socially constructed role later called gender, and it has been enormously influential because it shows that women's subordinate position is not natural destiny but a contingent human arrangement — and therefore something that can be changed.
The absurd is the collision between the human craving for meaning, clarity, and justice and a universe that offers none — silent and indifferent. Camus rejects both suicide and "philosophical suicide" (the leap to God or to a consoling grand system, which evades the absurd). Instead he recommends living with the absurd in lucid, defiant revolt: neither pretending the world makes sense nor surrendering to despair, but affirming life and wringing happiness from it precisely because it is all there is — "one must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Hegel's master–slave dialectic (Lesson 31), in which self-consciousness requires recognition by an other. Beauvoir argues that man has set himself up as the essential Subject (the One) and cast woman as the inessential Other, defined only in relation to him — but, unlike Hegel's slave, women have largely accepted this position rather than struggled against it. Seeing the structure reveals both the mechanism of oppression (woman made the Other, denied subjecthood) and the way out: women claiming the freedom, transcendence, and subjecthood that have been reserved for men.