Existentialism

Existentialism is the position that existence precedes essence: a person has no fixed nature given in advance and instead creates their own meaning through free choice and action. It is the label Sartre accepted and built his philosophy around, per sartre-camus-thecollector (TheCollector, T4).

For Sartre, consciousness opens a gap — nothingness — between the self and the objects it perceives, including other people (whom we experience as objects even while assuming they have their own subjectivity). That gap is what reveals possibilities and grounds radical freedom: a person is, in his phrase, "condemned to be free." Sartre later tried to fuse existentialism with Marxism through praxis, holding that freedom becomes real only when action changes material conditions — a fusion the source notes sits in tension with Marxism's own determined vision of history.

Camus, despite sharing existentialism's atheism and its diagnosis that we live through relations with others that can alienate as easily as fulfil, rejected the label for his own absurdism.

Related

jean-paul-sartre · albert-camus · absurdism · sartre-camus-thecollector · martin-heidegger · nihilism