The Weight of a Free Man

Existentialism begins with a single unsettling idea, which is that nobody handed us a script. Sartre put it in a phrase that has never been improved on. Existence precedes essence. Think of a paper knife. Before it is ever made, the craftsman already knows what it is for, so its purpose exists before the object does. Human beings, the existentialists insist, come into the world the other way round. We exist first, dropped into life without a manual, and only afterward, through the things we choose and do, do we make ourselves into whatever we become. There is no fixed human nature waiting inside us to be obeyed, no divine plan quietly assigning each of us a role, no true self buried underground for us to dig up and put on. We are, in Sartre’s famous and deliberately harsh formulation, condemned to be free.

The word condemned is doing real work. Most people expect a philosophy of freedom to be cheerful, and this one is not, or at least not simply. If nothing outside me decides who I am, then everything about who I am comes back to me, and there is nowhere left to hand off the responsibility. That is a far heavier thing to carry than most of the freedoms we imagine wanting, and much of the philosophy is really an attempt to describe what it is like to carry it honestly.

Where the idea came from

The tradition has a long backstory. The Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard, working in the 1840s against the vast impersonal philosophical systems of his day, insisted that no theory could ever swallow the reality of a single living person facing a genuine choice, and that faith itself was a leap made in fear and trembling by an individual rather than a conclusion reached by a crowd. Friedrich Nietzsche, a few decades later, announced that God was dead, by which he meant not a smug atheist boast but a diagnosis, that the old foundation beneath our values had quietly crumbled and most people had not yet noticed. His fear was that we would fill the hole with cheap substitutes, and his hope was that a braver kind of person might learn to create values instead of merely inheriting them. Martin Heidegger then turned the whole question toward existence itself, and toward the strange fact that we are the only creatures who live knowing that we will die, so that our entire existence is carried out facing that horizon, and only an honest reckoning with our own mortality can shake us out of the drowsy, borrowed lives most of us lead.

There is a literary forerunner too, and readers of these essays will recognise him. Dostoevsky, whose feverish underground narrator clings to his own freedom even when it wrecks him, was credited by Sartre with grasping, before the philosophers did, that if God does not exist then everything is permitted, and that this news is a terror long before it is a liberation. Out of all these sources, in the cafes of Paris in the 1940s, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir built the version of existentialism that became, for a while, the most talked-about philosophy in the world.

Freedom, anguish, and the effort to be honest

The heart of it is an account of freedom that most of us spend our lives avoiding. If no essence dictates what I must do, then in every situation I am choosing, and the choice is truly mine. Sartre calls the dizzy feeling that comes with realising this anguish. It is not fear of any particular thing. It is the vertigo of understanding that nothing outside my own will is holding me up, that I alone am answering for the person I am assembling out of my days. Faced with that weight, people run, and Sartre’s name for the running is bad faith, the small and large lies we tell ourselves in order to pretend we are not free. His famous example is a cafe waiter who performs being a waiter a little too perfectly, as though the role were a nature he was stuck with rather than a thing he chooses minute by minute. When someone says that they cannot help it, that this is simply how they are, they are usually in bad faith, disowning a freedom that frightens them. The opposite of bad faith is authenticity, which is not some glamorous self-expression but the plainer and harder willingness to admit that your life is yours and to answer for it.

Simone de Beauvoir carried this further than Sartre did, and arguably more honestly. In her own ethics she argued that my freedom is bound up with everyone else’s, so that I cannot be genuinely free while treating other people as objects. In The Second Sex she turned the whole apparatus on the situation of women, with the sentence that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. That line is existentialism applied directly to gender. There is no fixed female essence. There is a situation, a dense weave of expectations and constraints, into which women are thrown, and out of which their so-called nature is then manufactured and called natural. It remains one of the most consequential things the philosophy ever produced, and it is the clearest proof that these ideas were never only about a lone man staring into the void.

Camus, and his quarrel with the label

A distinction has to be made here, because it gets blurred all the time. Camus is filed under existentialism in every bookshop, and he spent his life objecting to the filing. His subject was the absurd, which is related but not the same. For Camus the absurd is not something located in the universe, nor something located in the self. It is a relationship between the two, the collision between our appetite for meaning and the flat silence of a world that offers none. Sartre asks how we should use our freedom to build meaning. Camus asks a blunter question. Can we live honestly once we have accepted that there is no meaning to build, and can we do it without lying to ourselves? He rules out two easy exits. One is ordinary suicide, giving up on a life because it has no point. The other, which he calls philosophical suicide, is the religious leap that invents a meaning in order to escape the silence. His answer is a third thing, which he calls revolt, and which means staying fully awake and alive inside the absurd, refusing both the despair and the false comfort. His image for it is Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill forever only to watch it roll back down. Camus insists that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, because he has looked his fate in the face and chosen to own it. That is not Sartre’s project of endless self-creation. It is something more stubborn, and in its own way more consoling.

The objections, and the afterlife

It would be dishonest to present all this as settled wisdom, because existentialism drew serious fire almost as soon as it became fashionable. Marxists complained that its lonely, choosing individual was a bourgeois fantasy, that real people are shaped by class and history far more than by private acts of will, and that telling a factory worker he is radically free is closer to a taunt than a philosophy. Later thinkers, drawing on Freud and then on the structures of language and society, argued that the sovereign self at the centre of the whole system is largely an illusion, that we are spoken by forces we do not choose and often cannot see. Sartre himself felt the force of the first objection and spent his later years trying to weld existentialism to Marxism, with mixed results. He also softened the harshness in a famous lecture, arguing that when I choose for myself I am in effect choosing an image of what a human being should be, so that my freedom carries a responsibility toward everyone, which made the philosophy sound less like despair and more like a demanding humanism. The movement’s pure moment passed, but its questions did not. They soaked into psychology, theology, literature, and the ordinary modern assumption that a person must find their own meaning rather than receive it, which is now so common we forget it was once a scandal.

Why it had to become literature

The reason existentialism belongs in a conversation about novels, and not only in a seminar, is that it was a literary movement almost as much as a philosophical one. Sartre wrote plays and fiction. De Beauvoir wrote novels alongside her treatises. Camus poured nearly all of his thinking into stories and essays rather than systems. This was not a marketing decision. It followed straight from the philosophy. If what matters is the concrete situation of a particular person choosing in a particular moment, then abstraction will always miss the very thing you are trying to describe. You cannot define freedom or anguish or bad faith into someone from the outside. You have to place them inside a life and let the reader feel it. A man on a sunlit beach who cannot make himself grieve. A talker in an Amsterdam bar who cannot stop confessing. A young woman under a glass dome who cannot choose among her own possible futures. A dreamer in Petersburg who gives away the only happiness he is ever offered. These are not ideas stapled onto stories. They are the ideas themselves, alive in the one form able to hold them.

Thrown into a world already running

One more idea deserves a place here, because it runs beneath all the novels and films these essays discuss, and it comes from Heidegger. He called it thrownness. We do not choose the century, the country, the body, the language, or the family we are born into. We arrive to find the game already in progress, the rules already set, a self already half-assembled by forces we had no say in. Freedom, in this philosophy, is therefore never freedom from that situation. It is only ever freedom within it, the freedom to take up what we have been handed and make something of it, or else to flee from it into the crowd. Heidegger had a name for that flight too. He called it falling into the they, the anonymous everyone whose opinions and habits and comforts we absorb precisely so that we never have to be anyone in particular. It is the same sickness Sartre called bad faith and Kurosawa filmed as a whole office of paper-shufflers passing every decision down the line. And its cure is the same in all of them, an honest reckoning with the fact that this life, thrown and unchosen as it is, is nonetheless ours to answer for. Esther under her jar, Meursault in his cell, Watanabe on his swing, Alma unravelling by the sea, each is a person waking to their own thrownness and deciding, too late or just in time, what to do with the little that is left to decide.

That, in the end, is what the philosophy offers, and why it has outlasted its own fashion. It does not tell you what to do, which is precisely the point, because the moment it did so it would be taking back the freedom it insists you already have. What it offers instead is a clear and unflinching account of the situation you are genuinely in. Unscripted. Responsible. Mortal. Free in a way that is frightening long before it is exhilarating. The best of these writers understood that such news is better delivered by a story than by an argument, because a story lets you feel the weight rather than simply be told about it. Read them, and you carry the free man’s burden for a few hundred pages, and set the book down knowing a little more honestly what it costs to be the author of your own life.