Existentialism & the Absurd Part 1: Foundations

What is Existentialism?

Existentialism is a philosophical movement that takes the individual human being — not abstract systems, not God, not impersonal nature — as the starting point of philosophy. It asks: What does it mean to exist as a self-aware, choice-making being in a world that gives us no instruction manual?

Existentialism emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries as a reaction against grand philosophical systems (like Hegel's) that treated individuals as interchangeable parts of a larger logic. Existentialists insisted that the felt experience of being this person, here, now, with these choices in front of me cannot be reduced to any system. Philosophy must begin where life is actually lived.

Core Concerns

Across very different thinkers, three concerns recur:

Not a System — A Family of Concerns

One of the great misconceptions about existentialism is that it is a unified doctrine. It is not. The thinkers we'll study in this series disagreed sharply:

• Kierkegaard was a devout Christian who took a leap toward faith.
• Nietzsche declared God dead and called for the creation of new values.
• Sartre was a militant atheist who saw freedom as humanity's defining (and burdensome) condition.
• Camus rejected the existentialist label entirely and called himself an absurdist.
• Heidegger resisted all three labels and built an entirely different vocabulary.

What is the Absurd?

If existentialism asks "What does it mean to exist?", absurdism asks something more pointed: What does it mean to exist when the universe refuses to answer?

The Absurd is not the same as the silly or the irrational. In Albert Camus's hands, "the Absurd" has a precise meaning:

Camus's Formulation

In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus opens with a stunning sentence: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." He is not being morbid. He is asking the most basic question: given that life is absurd, is it worth living?

His answer — the answer this whole series will build toward — is yes. But it is a strange, defiant yes:

• We can cheat the Absurd by suicide (escape it physically).
• We can cheat the Absurd by religious faith (escape it metaphysically — what Camus calls "philosophical suicide").
• Or we can face the Absurd directly — and live with passion, freedom, and revolt.

This third option — neither despair nor escape — is what Camus calls revolt. We will return to it in Part 4.

Everyday Absurdity

You don't need to read Camus to feel the Absurd. It shows up constantly:

Historical Context

Existentialism did not emerge in a vacuum. It was a response — sometimes a revolt — against three converging currents in Western thought.

1. Reaction to Enlightenment Rationalism

The 18th-century Enlightenment celebrated reason as the supreme human faculty. Thinkers like Kant believed reason could ground morality, knowledge, and even religion. By the 19th century, Hegel had constructed a vast system in which all of history was the unfolding of "Absolute Spirit" through rational stages.

Kierkegaard found this intolerable. He thought it covered over the actual experience of being a confused, anxious individual making choices without certainty. "Truth is subjectivity," he insisted — meaning that the most important truths are not the ones we calculate, but the ones we live, with our whole being, often without proof.

2. The Crisis of Religion & Meaning

The 19th century brought:

• Darwin (1859) — humans are evolved animals, not divinely placed at creation's center.
• Marx — religion is "the opium of the people," a coping mechanism for material misery.
• Nietzsche (1882) — "God is dead. And we have killed him."
• Freud — much of what we call "self" is unconscious drives we did not choose.

The traditional sources of meaning — God, soul, divine purpose — were no longer self-evident to many educated Europeans. But the need for meaning didn't disappear. The mismatch between the need and the void is what existentialism addresses.

3. Post-War Disillusionment

Existentialism's golden age — Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir in 1940s and 1950s Paris — followed two world wars, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Educated Europeans had to face the fact that the most "rational," "civilized" continent on Earth had also produced industrial-scale murder.

Sartre's lecture Existentialism is a Humanism (1945) was given to an overflow crowd in Paris precisely because people felt they needed a philosophy for a world whose old certainties had collapsed.

Why It Still Matters

Modern Relevance

You might think existentialism is a dusty 20th-century French concern. The opposite is true. Almost every challenge of modern life is, at heart, an existential challenge:

• Career anxiety: "I can be anything — but what should I be? And what if I choose wrong?" That dizziness is what Kierkegaard called the anxiety of freedom.
• Identity in the digital age: Curating an Instagram self vs. being a real self — Sartre would call the curated version bad faith.
• Meaning at work: Burnout, "quiet quitting," the search for purpose — these are existential symptoms, not just HR problems.
• Algorithmic life: When Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok decide what we see, are we still authentically choosing? This is a 2020s version of Heidegger's worry about being lost in "the They."
• Climate anxiety, AI anxiety: Living in a future you cannot predict, making decisions whose consequences you cannot fully see — this is existential terrain.

The Road Ahead

Across the next ten parts, we will move through the canon roughly chronologically:

1. Kierkegaard (Part 2) — the Christian father of existential thought, on despair and the leap of faith.
2. Sartre (Part 3) — radical atheist freedom, bad faith, and authenticity.
3. Camus (Part 4) — the Absurd, Sisyphus, and the philosophy of revolt.
4. Cross-thinker themes (Part 5) — freedom, anxiety, meaning, alienation across the canon.
5. Expanding the canon (Part 6) — Nietzsche, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Kafka, Dostoevsky.
6. Ethics (Part 7) — what does morality look like without God or fixed nature?
7. Psychology (Part 8) — existential therapy, meaning-centered therapy, Yalom's four ultimate concerns.
8. Literature & art (Part 9) — how the Absurd lives in novels, plays, and films.
9. Modern applications (Part 10) — AI, business, society, existential risks.
10. Advanced topics (Part 11) — absurdism vs nihilism, time, death, identity in the digital age.