We often encounter the idea of an "existential crisis" and immediately picture a world drained of color. We think of pessimism, melancholy, and sadness—a black-and-white image of rain streaking down a windowpane as we sit alone, brooding. It's commonly seen as a philosophy of despair. But our task here is to see past this misunderstanding and discover why existentialism is, in fact, a philosophy of radical freedom, a way of thinking that believes in our power to change ourselves more than we often dare to.

A World Without a Compass

Though it truly flowered in the 20th century, the seeds of existentialism were planted in the 19th. We see them in Søren Kierkegaard, a religious philosopher who championed the profound value of individual human existence. We see them in Fyodor Dostoevsky, a figure so monumental that Albert Camus would not only study his work but adapt his novels for the stage.

But the ground was truly broken by Friedrich Nietzsche. His thunderous declaration, "God is dead," was not a cry of celebration but an observation of a deep spiritual and intellectual crisis unfolding in European culture. "We have killed him," Nietzsche wrote, pointing to the moment when the religious worldview ceased to be the central force explaining our world. It lost its power, and with its retreat from the intellectual landscape, humanity was left alone.

We are, in the existentialist view, "abandoned" in this world. We were not asked where or how we would be born. We simply find ourselves here, in a world about which we know nothing, yet possessing an intense, human urge to find meaning in it. Here is the first great conflict: we are beings who desperately seek meaning in a universe that offers none. It is not just silent; it is empty of any pre-written purpose. This realization—that I know nothing about myself, and the world itself is a void of meaning—created the intellectual crisis from which existentialism would be born.

Sartre would later say that in each of us there is "a hole the size of God," and we spend our lives trying to fill it. Nietzsche saw this as living under the "shadow of God," a lingering emptiness that weighs upon us. This feeling of meaninglessness is the first step, but the journey into the 20th century would challenge our identity even further.

The Assault on the Self

The turn of the 20th century brought forth ideas that dismantled the traditional image of the human being, an image cultivated since antiquity and celebrated through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Sigmund Freud argued that our conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg; we are steered by a vast ocean of the unconscious, which dictates our desires, fears, and phobias. Karl Marx showed that we are not masters of our own will but products of an ensemble of socio-economic relations that realize themselves through us.

Both Freud and Marx, in their own ways, suggested that the individual is not the true source of their own actions. We are instead mediators for larger forces, be they psychological or economic. Our sense of a stable, independent self was being undermined.

Then came the wars. The First World War shattered the Enlightenment dream of the rational human. Reason, it turned out, led to chemical attacks, trenches, and industrial-scale slaughter. It gave rise to the "lost generation" and the raw, pained art of Expressionism, a style born from disappointment in the very idea of man. The Second World War took this disillusionment to its horrifying conclusion. As Theodor Adorno famously asked, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." How can we speak of art, beauty, or progress in a world that witnessed genocide?

The 20th century, with its world wars, its bureaucratic nightmares as depicted by Franz Kafka, and its philosophies of determinism, seemed to plunge us into an abyss where the human was not a powerful, independent authority, but a subordinate cog in a machine.

The Rebellion of Being

It is precisely from the ashes of this intellectual and historical devastation that existential philosophy emerges. It rises up and declares that the key value, the only certainty in this world, is the individual human being and their freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and their contemporaries developed their most important works during or in the shadow of the Second World War. For many of them, the raw experience of life in prison camps or the resistance movement became a philosophical crucible. In an age of total human destruction, existentialism says no—the human is the main truth, the only thing worth defending.

Camus captures this situation perfectly. We enter a world we long to understand, but the world is deaf to our questions. This clash between our human call for meaning and the universe's unreasonable silence is what he calls the absurd. The absurd is not in us, nor is it in the world; it is in the tension between the two.

What, then, are we to do? For Camus, the answer lies in the myth of Sisyphus, the Greek hero condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down. We must imagine Sisyphus happy. We must, like him, create. We must haul the boulder of our own meaning, our own creativity, into this world, knowing full well that we will die and that there is nothing after. We must rebel against the absurd by living passionately in spite of it. This rebellion is not about building barricades in the streets, but an internal, intellectual act of defiance against our condition.

You Are What You Do

Sartre is the philosopher who most clearly conceptualized this movement. His central idea is a revolutionary reversal of centuries of Western thought: existence precedes essence.

Think of the old ideas. Plato believed we had an immortal soul with pre-existing knowledge. Descartes argued for two substances, a thinking mind and an extended body. Religion teaches us we are born with a soul, and perhaps original sin. In all these views, our essence—our fundamental nature—is already there before we begin to live.

Sartre turns this upside down. He says there is no pre-defined human nature. We are born as nothing. We are a project. We are emptiness. We are thrown into the world, and only then, through our actions, our choices, and our desires, do we begin to create who we are. I exist, and by existing, I accumulate and build my own essence. My full essence, however, only appears at the moment of my death. When my existence ends, my life's project is complete, and what I was becomes fixed. Until then, I am simply existing, making moral choices, doing things, and gradually forming myself.

This is why borderline situations are so revealing. In Camus's novel The Plague, an isolated city faces a total, inescapable evil. The characters are defined not by who they were before, but by how they choose to react. Do they give in? Do they fight? Do they try to escape? These choices, made under ultimate pressure, create their essence.

This brings us to a core tenet of existentialism: the refusal to shift responsibility. We love to make excuses: "It's just my character," "I was only following orders," "Society made me do it." Existentialism cuts through all of this. It insists that you, and only you, are responsible for your decisions. In the war crimes trials that followed WWII, a common defense from officers was "it was an order." Existential thought argues there is no hiding behind such justifications. You are always responsible for what you do.

Freedom, Hell, and the Power to Create

If we are born as nothing into a world with no inherent meaning, we are gifted something terrifying and wonderful: total, unlimited freedom. Nothing predetermines our actions—not our genes, not our nationality, not our social conditioning. Only I am the source of what I do.

But this freedom comes at a price. It condemns us to an equally unlimited responsibility. Freedom is responsibility. I am accountable for every action, every choice, every desire, because there is nothing else to blame it on. This realization can plunge a person into a crisis, a feeling of being lost without an identity. But in this loss, existentialism finds our greatest strength.

Rely on yourself. Create yourself as a project. Act, decide, and be responsible for it. This is not a pessimistic philosophy of fear and dread. It is a philosophy that believes in you, that hands you the awesome power to create yourself from scratch.

This is also the meaning behind Sartre's famous line from his play No Exit: "Hell is other people." It is often misinterpreted as simple misanthropy. The real meaning is more profound. When you are existing, you are a fluid process, a project in motion. But when another person looks at you, their gaze turns you into a finished object. They see "a person" with defined traits. They see your essence as if you were already dead. This experience of being objectified, of having your living, breathing existence frozen into a static entity by another's perception, that is the experience of hell.

Ultimately, existentialism is one of the few 20th-century ideas to declare, against the roar of history, that the individual matters. It tells us that in a meaningless world, we are the creators of meaning. It doesn't offer easy comfort, but it offers something far more valuable: the power and the responsibility to be whoever we choose to be.

References

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Yale University Press, 2007.

  This is one of the most accessible introductions to existential thought, based on a public lecture Sartre gave in 1945. It directly addresses the criticisms that existentialism is a pessimistic or quietist philosophy. Sartre lays out his core principle that "existence precedes essence" and explores the profound implications of this idea for freedom, responsibility, and human solidarity (e.g., see pages 20-24 for the core thesis, and 29-30 for the concept of being "condemned to be free").

• Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Vintage International, 1991.

  In this foundational essay, Camus explores the concept of the absurd—the conflict between humanity's search for meaning and the universe's indifference. It is not a call to despair but to rebellion, freedom, and passion. The essay famously concludes that "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy" (p. 123), perfectly illustrating the existentialist response to a meaningless world.