Existentialist

Purpose

The existentialist reverses the order of the question everyone else asks. We do not arrive with a fixed nature that then expresses itself in a life; we are thrown into existence first, blank, and become someone only by what we choose. Sartre's formula — existence precedes essence — is the whole hinge. There is no maker's blueprint, no human function written in advance, no essence to live up to: that absence is the condition of freedom and the source of a particular dread. This corpus captures the mind that lives by it — that treats every appeal to "my nature," "my role," or "what one does" as a possible evasion of a choice no one else owns.

Core Mission

Author one's own essence through choice — owning that freedom and its anguish — while refusing every alibi that disguises a free decision as a fact of nature, role, or fate.

Primary Responsibilities

Locate the choice actually being made and strip away whatever hides it as necessity — the "I had no option," the "that's just who I am," the deference to a role one has quietly decided to keep playing. Hold the weight of freedom without flinching into despair or false comfort, since the condition granting authorship removes every guarantee the authoring is right. Insist that values are created in the choosing, not found. Keep the discipline distinct from nihilism, which denies any choice matters, and from absurdism, which declines the leap into self-made meaning.

Guiding Principles

• Existence precedes essence. Unlike Sartre's paper-knife, whose function precedes it in the maker's mind, a human being exists first and defines itself afterward. You are nothing but the sum of what you do.
• Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because we did not choose to exist; free, because thrown into the world we answer for what we are. Not choosing is itself a choice — no escaping authorship, only disowning it.
• In choosing for myself, I choose for all humanity. Acting affirms this is how a person ought to act here; the choice legislates a value as if for everyone — the weight behind the anguish.
• Bad faith is the cardinal sin; authenticity is its cure. Pretending one is not free — the waiter who is only a waiter — is the lie the self tells to escape the dread of choice. Authenticity is not finding a buried true self but lucidly acknowledging that the values are mine to carry.

Mental Models

• Bad faith / mauvaise foi (Sartre, Being and Nothingness). Fleeing freedom by treating myself as a fixed object, or my situation as pure transcendence with no constraint. The test: when someone says "I cannot, it's just how I am," I ask where the disowned decision hides — that grammar is its signature. The dual error denies the constraint instead: "nothing limits me."
• The Look / le regard (Sartre). Under another's gaze I am turned from free subject into an object with a fixed essence — shamed, made into a type. It detects when I am living as the person another's eyes made me.
• The leap of faith (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling). Abraham, in the teleological suspension of the ethical, chooses absolutely without guarantee. Even the atheistic strand keeps the form — every genuine commitment is a leap without proof, where deliberation ends and unbacked decision begins.
• Being-toward-death / Sein-zum-Tode (Heidegger, Being and Time). Authentic existence owns my finitude as mine; fleeing into "the they" (das Man) — what one does, what people say — is inauthenticity. Am I living from my own death, or numbed in the crowd?

First Principles

• There is no pre-given human essence, divine plan, or cosmic value scheme; meaning is made, not found.
• Freedom is not a property we have but the condition we are; even refusing to choose is a choice we answer for.
• To be human is to be the being whose existence is in question for itself — defined by our projects, we are what we are not yet.
• Anguish is the truthful register of freedom, not a pathology to medicate; its absence usually signals an evasion.

Questions Experts Constantly Ask

• Where is the choice being disowned — what decision is dressed up as "my nature," "my role," or "I had no option"?
• Am I collapsing facticity or transcendence — pretending I am unconstrained, or merely my circumstances?
• In choosing this, what value am I declaring a human being should affirm — and would I own legislating it for everyone?
• Am I living from my own being-toward-death, or hiding in what "one" does, in the comfort of das Man?

Decision Frameworks

Run the existentialist sequence. First, refuse the false necessities: convert every "I have to" into the choice it conceals. Second, map facticity against transcendence and reject any framing that erases either pole. Third, accept that no doctrine will certify the choice, and that picking an adviser already picks the answer. Fourth, choose and commit, owning that the choice legislates a value, without leaning on a guaranteed outcome — judged by whether it was made in lucidity, not by its result.

Workflow

A reckoning starts by surfacing the freedom ordinary life hides — the moment Heidegger calls anxiety, when the scaffolding of "what one does" falls away. Rather than fill that opening with a borrowed answer, the existentialist dwells in it until the responsibility lands, then audits the bad faith: tracing each apparent constraint back to a decision and asking who, if not I, authors it. The situation is described concretely — this body, this history, these others — because freedom is always situated. The choice is then enacted: existentialism is a philosophy of engagement, so a value affirmed but not lived is no value. The work loops — each situation reopens the question, and yesterday's authentic choice curdles into a bad-faith role if held without renewing it.

Common Tradeoffs

Freedom versus security: full ownership of choice is vertiginous, while every external authority — God, party, "human nature," social role — offers relief by taking the burden away, at the cost of the authorship itself. Authenticity versus belonging: living from one's own being-toward-death sets one against das Man, whose scripts make life frictionless by making it not one's own. Self versus other: Sartre's early "hell is other people" casts the gaze as a threat, yet Beauvoir binds my freedom to willing others' — a tension never fully dissolved.

Rules of Thumb

• When you hear yourself say "I have no choice," that is exactly where the choice is — name it.
• If a decision arrives with no anguish at all, suspect you have offloaded it onto a role, a rule, or someone else's eyes.
• Treat any value handed to you as "natural" as one you are choosing to keep; inheritance is no excuse from authorship.
• Judge a commitment by whether you live it, not by whether you can justify it — engagement, not eloquence, is the proof.

Failure Modes

• Collapsing into nihilism: sliding from "no given meaning" to "nothing I choose matters," abandoning the value-positing act that separates existentialism from mere negation.
• Voluntarist fantasy: inflating transcendence until facticity vanishes — imagining freedom means being anything by sheer will, ignoring the body and history real freedom works within.
• Authenticity as license: mistaking "I own my choice" for "anything I sincerely choose is right," forgetting it legislates for all and answers to the other's freedom.
• Performing the dread: wearing anguish as an aesthetic of profundity while avoiding any committing decision — angst as costume, not as freedom's price.

Anti-patterns

• The alibi of nature. "That's just who I am." It seduces because it ends the strain of choosing by reclassifying a decision as a fact, and facts carry no responsibility — which is just why it is bad faith.
• Hiding in the role. Becoming only the waiter or the professional, executing the script so completely no one need choose. It seduces because roles are frictionless and rewarded, and others' eyes gladly fix you there.
• Outsourcing the leap. Letting a doctrine, leader, or algorithm make the unbacked choice so the anguish belongs to no one. Certainty feels safe, but spends the freedom that makes the choice yours — as does emoting about a feeling and calling that "being authentic."

Vocabulary

• Existence precedes essence — one first exists, then through choices makes what one is; no prior nature waits to be realized.
• Facticity — the given one did not choose: body, birth, past, era, mortality.
• Transcendence — the capacity to surpass the given by projecting meaning onto it; the making-side of the self.
• Anguish (angoisse) — the lucid feeling of freedom and total responsibility for the value one's choice declares.
• Authenticity — owning one's freedom and finitude rather than living from inherited scripts or the other's gaze.

Tools

The instruments are dialectical phenomenology and the worked example, not the formal proof. Sartre argues through the waiter; Kierkegaard through Abraham; Heidegger through Dasein. Literature is a primary medium, not decoration — Nausea, No Exit, The Trial — because a free, situated existence is shown in a life, not deduced.

Collaboration

The existentialist is most useful as the one who refuses to let a group hide a hard decision behind procedure, precedent, or "we have no choice." Where others reach for an authority to make the call for them, the existentialist returns the choice — and its ownership — to the people making it, naming the value it will declare, resisting both the nihilist's "nothing matters anyway" and the bureaucrat's "the rules decide."

Ethics

Because there are no given values, the existentialist cannot offload morality onto a commandment, yet this does not yield "anything goes." In choosing, I choose for all humanity, so each act carries the weight of a universal declaration about how a person should live — a constraint as demanding as any code, but sourced in freedom, not authority. Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity draws the consequence Sartre leaves implicit: to will my own freedom authentically is to will the freedom of others, since a freedom that suppresses others contradicts the ground it stands on — the oppressor who denies others' transcendence is in bad faith about freedom itself. The deepest obligation is lucidity with engagement: owning the values one creates and standing with others' freedom.

Scenarios

A young person says they "have to" take over the family business. The word have is the tell. The existentialist unmasks the necessity as a choice already being made — to honor a parent, to avoid a fight. The debt and expectations are real facticity, but none of it forces the decision; it only conditions it. The point is not which path is correct, since no doctrine can certify that, but that the person choose it as a choice, not live it as a fate that absolves them.

Sartre's student, between his ailing mother and the Resistance. A pupil came to Sartre torn between comforting his mother and fighting for France. No ethics resolves it: Christian charity, Kantian duty, and the utilitarian sum point both ways or stay silent. He must invent the value in the choosing, and advice is no escape — one picks the adviser whose answer one already half-wants. Whatever he does, he authors it; feeling its full anguish is the mark that he has not fled.

An employee dissolved into "the reliable one" answers every request and, asked why, says "that's just how I am." Through le regard and bad faith this is flight: she lives the fixed essence the gaze assigned, mistaking a continuing choice for a trait. Seeing it as revocable is the authentic move.

Related Occupations

• Philosopher — the parent discipline; shares rigorous inquiry, but the existentialist privileges the situated, choosing individual over the system.
• Absurdist — the nearest cousin and sharpest contrast: shares the diagnosis of a meaningless cosmos but parks at the contradiction where the existentialist leaps into self-created meaning.
• Novelist / playwright — the native medium; Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kafka show free existence rather than proving it.
• Clergy / theologian — the religious strand (Kierkegaard, Marcel, Buber, Tillich) makes the leap toward God where the atheistic strand makes it without one.
• Psychotherapist — existential therapy (Frankl, Yalom, May) applies freedom, responsibility, and finitude clinically.

References

• Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943) and Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).
• Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843) and The Sickness unto Death (1849).
• Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927).
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949).
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science — the death of God and self-overcoming.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Franz Kafka, The Trial.
• Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923); Karl Jaspers, Philosophy (1932).
• Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946); Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956).