Existentialism & the Absurd Part 5: Core Existential Themes

Freedom & Responsibility

If existentialism has a single distinguishing claim, it is this: human beings are radically free, and therefore radically responsible. Across very different metaphysics, every existentialist grapples with this twin insistence.

Two Senses of Freedom

To avoid confusion, distinguish two senses of "freedom" the existentialists do not mean:

• Political freedom — the absence of external coercion (free speech, free assembly). Important, but not what existentialism is about.
• Metaphysical free will as the technical opposite of determinism — the question of whether neural events are causally undetermined. Most existentialists are uninterested in this debate.

What they mean is something more lived. Even in the most constrained circumstances — Sartre under Nazi occupation, Frankl in Auschwitz, the prisoner in the cell — there remains a residual zone of choice: how I take up my situation, what I make of it, what posture I adopt toward it. This existential freedom is what cannot be taken from a conscious being short of death.

The Weight of Responsibility

Freedom is not, on the existentialist account, a relief. It is a burden. If you are free, you are responsible — to yourself, for who you become; and (Sartre adds) to humanity, since each choice silently nominates a model of how a human being should be.

This is why existentialism is sometimes accused of being gloomy. It refuses every move that would let you off the hook: you cannot blame your nature, your upbringing, your culture, your unconscious, the algorithm, or the times. Those things shape your situation; they do not choose for you. The buck stops here.

Anxiety, Anguish & Dread

Different translators give us different words — Kierkegaard's Angest, Heidegger's Angst, Sartre's angoisse — but the concept is shared: a particular mood that arises when a free being confronts its own freedom.

Anxiety vs Fear

Fear has a specific object: I fear the snake, the loss, the diagnosis. Remove the object and the fear goes. Anxiety has no determinate object. It floats. It is a mood about the human situation as such — about being free, finite, suspended over possibility.

Heidegger says that in anxiety, the world becomes "uncanny" (unheimlich, "unhomely"). The familiar tools and roles that usually let us go about our day quietly slip out of focus, and we glimpse our naked existence. Anxiety, in this sense, is what reveals the question of existence.

Anxiety as Educator

This is where existentialism diverges from much of modern psychology. Where contemporary therapy often treats anxiety as a symptom to be reduced, the existential tradition treats structural anxiety (as opposed to clinical anxiety disorder) as a signal that something important is at stake — that a real choice is in front of you. The cure is not less anxiety but better choosing.

Finitude & Death

You are going to die. So is everyone you love. So is everyone you have ever met. Existentialism takes this fact — which most cultures and most lives are organized to ignore — and places it at the center of philosophy.

Being-Toward-Death

Heidegger's term Sein-zum-Tode ("Being-toward-death") names the structural feature of human existence that I am, at every moment, the being that can die and that will die. Death is not an event that happens to me at the end of my life; it is a possibility woven into every moment of it.

Most of the time we cover this over. We talk about "people" who die, statistically, somewhere, sometime. The newspaper death is always the death of the They — never quite my own. To own one's death — to grasp it as my own most, non-relational, certain, and indeterminate possibility — is, for Heidegger, the condition of authentic existence.

The Mortality Mirror

Meaning-Making

Premodern cultures gave meaning by inheritance. You were a Catholic, a peasant, a daughter, a member of this clan in this village under this God. The script was written; you played your part.

The existentialist diagnosis is that for many late-modern people, that script no longer arrives. The sources that used to install meaning (religion, tradition, fixed social roles, given vocations) have weakened or pluralized to the point that most adults have to compose their own life-meaning from a confusing buffet of options.

Given vs Made

This is where existentialists divide:

• Kierkegaard, Marcel, Buber: Meaning is ultimately given, but it must be inwardly received and lived. The given comes from God or from genuine encounter with another person.
• Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir: Meaning is not given; it must be made. We are the value-creating animal in a value-empty universe.
• Heidegger: Meaning emerges from how we are situated in a world of practical concerns; the question is whether we let it be appropriated authentically or in conformity with the They.
• Frankl: Meaning is discovered, not invented — but it is always particular to this person in this situation.

Sources of Meaning

Across these disagreements, three sources of lived meaning recur:

Alienation

Existentialism inherits from Hegel and Marx (and develops in its own direction) the diagnosis that modern life systematically alienates us — that the conditions under which we live tend to estrange us from ourselves, from others, and from the world.

From Self, Others, World

• From self — we live as the role, the resume, the curated profile, rather than as the inward self that has those things. Kierkegaard's despair, Sartre's bad faith, Heidegger's lostness in the They are all forms of self-alienation.
• From others — relationships become instrumental, transactional; we relate as objects exchanged in a system rather than as I to Thou. Marx's commodified labor, Heidegger's idle talk, Sartre's hellish mutual objectification each capture a face of this.
• From the world — the natural world, once a home full of meaning, becomes a "standing reserve" (Heidegger) of resources to be exploited. We pass through the world without being in it.

Alienation is not just a feeling. It is, the existentialists insist, a structural feature of certain ways of living. To overcome it is not therapeutic ("learn to feel better about your job"); it requires changing the way you actually live, work, and relate.

Authenticity vs Inauthenticity

The contrast between authentic and inauthentic existence is the master ethical contrast of existentialism. It cuts across every theme above.

Heidegger's Das Man

In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger gives the most influential analysis of inauthenticity. We exist, mostly, as das Man — "the They," "the One." We do what one does. We think what one thinks. We want what one wants. The "one" is everywhere and nobody. There is no specific person who is the They; it is the diffuse pressure of the average.

Das Man is not merely sinister. It is, Heidegger says, our default mode — and it has its uses. It lets us coordinate, communicate, get through the day. The problem is when we only live this way, when there is no moment of stepping back and asking "Is this life mine?"

What Authenticity Asks

Authenticity is not "being unique" or "being weird." It is not a personality style. It is a relation to one's own existence. Across the canon, authenticity asks four things:

None of the existentialists believe you achieve authenticity once and keep it. It is a practice, undertaken again in each new situation, and abandoned each time we slip back into the They. The honest existentialist admits that bad faith is the default and authenticity is the exception. The point is not perfection. It is the orientation.