This essay appeared in Griffith Review 80: Creation Stories. My deepest thanks to the outstanding editing team Carody and John.

ON OCTOBER 29 1945, less than a year after France’s liberation from the Germans, a man disembarked a train in central Paris. Some of the silhouettes he passed in the street probably recognised his face. His name was Jean-Paul Sartre and he was the leader of a new intellectual movement. He was travelling to give a lecture at the Club Maintenant, hoping to defend and explain his controversial beliefs. Plays, novels, serious works of philosophy, newspaper articles: the contents of Sartre’s head were everywhere, his byline unavoidable. The ideas he printed were avant-garde in the extreme. He was infamous, divisive, in demand.

Sartre represented a group of French intellectuals who spoke to the atmosphere of dislocation following the war. Their movement, which Sartre called existentialism, emphasised the struggle of deciding who to be and how to live. This is a struggle many today might call second nature; we are used to thinking of ourselves as independent and self-authoring. Identity in postwar Europe had similar characteristics, albeit unintentionally. Two world wars had shattered a layered sense of belonging. For centuries, Europeans had referred to themselves via the larger identifiers of religion, nationality, class, culture, lineage and shared belief. The survivors of fascism were left to pick their way through the rubble of these monoliths. Certainty was gone, crushed by mass destruction enabled by mass identities.

Europe had a short yet intense relationship with existentialism in the brief pause before the Cold War. As a movement, existentialism created space for thought and encouraged calm progressivism. It was a forerunner of post-structuralism and the anti-establishment movements of the 1960s. Today existentialism has lost most of its cultural influence. This is a shame because it’s a unique philosophy that treats individuality as an ongoing project and human fragility as a source of solidarity. This essay is a celebration of these themes and of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, two authors who epitomised existentialism on the page and in their messy working relationship. Their writings cannot solve our problems but they provide something rarer and more valuable: a sense of shared experience that transcends the differences and disagreements that come from the struggle to define oneself.

WHEN SARTRE ARRIVED at the club ready to meet his critics, he found a confronting scene. The event had sold out: a frustrated, ticketless crowd eddied in the street outside. Inside, the heat of human bodies hung close. Sartre shouldered his way to the front of the room, claimed the podium and began to speak.

His work tapped into a latent energy in his compatriots. Communists and Catholics were enraged by his views; they had turned out en masse to condemn him as a heretic. Both groups had a plan for France’s reconstruction, and neither included individualism or freedom. The rest of the crowd just wanted to know more. At points throughout the night – and even before Sartre arrived – furniture was broken. People fainted. The police were called.

The speech he gave was transcribed and published as the book Existentialism is a Humanism. It is a dynamic and urgent work of very public philosophy. One can almost hear the audience and feel their reactions guiding each phrase. Sartre told the hecklers they misunderstood his beliefs. He was not a nihilist, defeatist or misanthrope. Existentialists did not hate religion or believe progress impossible. They simply believed that ‘existence precedes essence’. Individuals aren’t born to fit a preconceived mould, and we don’t step forth into an ordered universe with truths waiting to be uncovered. In Sartre’s words, ‘man first exists: he materialises in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself’.

This might seem self-evident to many readers. However, this familiarity is due to the sweeping individualism of our era rather than the timeless nature of Sartre’s assertions. Today we assume individuals should choose how to live; Sartre, by contrast, was speaking in an era still dominated by monoliths. It feels insane to write, but the Axis powers waged total war to establish global racial supremacy. They deemed national purity and the virility of the state important enough to liquidate millions and subjugate billions. The Allies who defeated this madness drew their power from colonial empires built on less extreme versions of the same worldview. The existentialist argument that there is no destiny waiting for us in the form of a predefined way of life – be it racial, cultural, religious or ideological – is a radical departure from history. Humans have lived according to different versions of identity-based destiny for millennia. Mass identities can offer a shortcut to finding a place and a sense of self in the world, but they are also the engine of division and violence between competing groups. It’s a double-edged sword and nigh unavoidable: taken too far, any attempt at belonging ends in exclusion and persecution for those who do not belong in that specific way.

Existentialism avoids the division to which mass identity is prone. Yet it is still a philosophy with unsettling implications. Today we like to think of individuals as some combination of nature and nurture but, Sartre insisted, if we take individuality seriously it means total separation and aloneness. We are ‘condemned to be free’. If we really do have our own unique consciousness, it follows that we are never unified with anything else. We are biologically alone in our brain, forced to hunker down with our solitary thoughts and piece things together for ourselves. Imagine telling this to staunch religionists at close quarters.

Sartre told the crowd that the extreme aloneness of an individual is compounded by the lack of guidance available to them. He described our underlying condition as a state of ‘anguish’ because we know, deep down, that there are no ‘values’ or ‘signs’ that can reliably help us choose how to live. This is perhaps his most challenging argument. Sure, he said, ethical doctrines such as the Ten Commandments and the legal system do exist – and we frequently use them – but they don’t absolve us of responsibility for our actions. In fact, the opposite is true: we are responsible for both our actions and the way we justify them. As Sartre put it, ‘man interprets the sign as he pleases and…man is therefore without any support or help, condemned at all times to invent man’.

For the majority of one’s life, with a good measure of luck, one can fit straightforwardly within the broad model of behaviour that predominates in society. The choices we make mostly align with the set of costs and rewards learnt through socialisation. In Sartre’s language, this conformity is an affirmation of the ‘man’ others have ‘invented’. Genuine ethical dilemmas emerge when we choose not to conform, or one principle in the invention conflicts with another. Euthanasia is one example. If a loved one is in agony, you could provide relief illegally or uphold the legal system that keeps the collective safe and secure for the majority of our lives. Sartre would say you must choose between them, but there is no correct answer – only the choice you end up making and the reason you had for making it.

What if the case was murder? What if a loved one was the victim? Would you accept the norm that allows a murderer to trade a life for a few decades in prison? In these moments of contradiction, when the order of our world conflicts and we must arbitrate the difference, we choose specifically who we are. You aren’t fully law abiding, for instance, until you reject a good reason to break the law. When we make these decisions, we become aware that we are alone. The norms and systems and groups of people we belong to – the richness of our social life – might over time come to feel like destiny, but the truth is each thread of the tapestry represents a choice.

Sartre insists we are radically free on one hand, impossibly responsible on the other. It’s relentless and confronting, but also refreshing, to read a theory of individualism so realistic about empowerment. There is no attempt to sell or applaud this way of life: in truth, Sartre sounds stoic. The one thing we cannot choose is to forgo our predicament. And, paradoxically, that is where the silver lining resides. As Sartre said to the crowd: ‘although it is impossible to find in every man a universal essence that could be said to comprise human nature, there is nonetheless a universal human condition.’

Humans are not inherently good or evil, smart or stupid and so on. There is no blueprint. Humanity shares a set of limitations that each of us seeks to overcome in our own unique way. We make our choices and choose our reasons and can never really know if we did right. One thing we can be certain of, though, is the fact that every other person, past and present, faced the same uncertainty. That is our consolation. Sartre confronts and challenges his audience but ultimately leaves us with a message of empathy that stretches across every creed and character. All humans begin from the same baseline, and none escape it.  

The night Sartre spoke in Paris can be seen as a hinge in time, the moment when modernity and its focus on individual identity came to the fore after the destruction of the old order. We are still living on the far side of the door Sartre pointed us through. Of course, modernity had a thousand authors. It was the product of billions of lives lived in close proximity. But Sartre, to me, best articulated a modern creed of what it means to be human. His lecture in 1945 meets everyone at their point of origin, before our choices produce similarities and differences. He assembled a philosophy that commiserates with the inescapable struggle that is self-determination.

UNLIKE COMMUNISTS, ANARCHISTS, liberals and Christians, France’s existentialists posed little threat to the Vichy government during the war. Existentialism recognises but does not seek to replace the unfortunate circumstance of being human. Its proponents have never spilt blood for their cause, and few have imposed themselves on the world. In 1940s France they were a wartime movement of writers huddled over their work in cafés, warding off the winter chill and getting their feelings straight on the page. They lacked the hard-headed sense of purpose that flows from a righteous sense of belonging to something more than oneself. Revolutionaries joined the Resistance; existentialists appeased Vichy censors.

Sartre, for his part, wrote his way through the war like his life depended on spilling ink. Even though circumstances conspired to force him into visceral extremities, he refused to engage. He was conscripted in 1943 to serve as a weatherman and spent months watching the sky, his pen fixed to the page, filling textbook after textbook with musings and snippets. In one of those notepads, he wrote ‘never have I known seriousness. My whole life has been just a game… [a]nd this war is just a game for me.’ He was captured soon after and became a prisoner of war. During his captivity, he sketched plays and the outline of Being and Nothingness,his most important philosophical work.

Upon returning to occupied Paris, Sartre occupied himself as a novelist and editor. He was simultaneously immersed in war and unaffected, adopting a careless and distant relationship with reality as it tumbled down around him. Sartre was a thinker in the mould of Marx – someone obsessively seeking an ideal theory, a flawless manuscript – and existentialism, in its purest form, is a philosophy that looks solely within, only indirectly and perhaps accidently reaching the outside world. That is why Sartre’s existentialism overlooks the obstacles that apply to us each differently within the human condition – inequality, race, gender, upbringing, culture, misfortune, cruelty. This is not a body of thought that engages with specific obstacles. Rather, existentialism retreats so far from the real world that it achieves universality.

Radical introversion places existentialism in a different category to almost every other philosophy. Most philosophy focuses on obstacles in the real world while skating around the experiences that make us human. Facets of human behaviour are simply asserted either at the outset or as the theory unfolds: humans are all rational or fearful, amoral or productive, fallen or blessed and so on. Human nature is worked back to from the goals of the author – be that revolution, raising or lowering the interests of a certain group, maintaining social stability or building the best possible society.

Unlike other bodies of thought that try to weld us into an obedient mass, existentialism lives in the solitary sense of uncertainty that paralyses us all from time to time. That is, I think, why it surged into the mainstream during the Second World War at the moment of decisive rupture when the ancient structures that had clung on throughout industrialisation finally collapsed. Europe was paralysed by violence. France was defeated and then occupied by a totalitarian force, its people frozen en masse in what must have been existential terror. The identity of the species itself was in question. Normal philosophy with its normal orientation towards problems broke down: the problems were too big and ran too deep for anything specific to make sense.

As France’s paralysis took hold, novels and plays and articles by Sartre, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and many others flooded bookshelves and theatres. These wartime existentialists wrote about freedom and responsibility in abstract ways. They destabilised resistance and galvanised inaction. Their inward-facing escapism also offered relief from the crushing drone of fascist propaganda. Writers trapped in France fell over themselves to adopt the tacitly approved themes. One of those writers was Albert Camus.

IN JUNE 1943 Sartre’s play The Flies opened in Paris. It was an existentialist interpretation of an ancient Greek tragedy. Completely anodyne, from a political point of view. Sartre was in the lobby of the theatre when a man approached him and introduced himself. From black-and-white pictures, I imagine the man was sleek, aquiline and perhaps he wore his iconic trench coat with the collar popped like Humphrey Bogart. It was Camus and Sartre’s first meeting. For years they had read, reviewed and admired one another from afar. They made small talk. During the dwindling months of the war, their shared love of the theatre developed into friendship.

Camus was a second-generation Algerian of French descent. He grew up in a two-bedroom flat with three other siblings. Tuberculosis haunted Camus from a young age, derailing a soccer career and jeopardising his academic interests. Drifting into journalism, he contributed to left-wing Algerian newspapers. He joined and then left the Algerian Communist Party, disturbed by their revolutionary fervour. He meandered between France and Algeria for most of his adult life, charming his contemporaries and producing staid editorials. Between 1942 and 1956 he published the famous novels The Outsider, The Plague, and The Fall.

The Outsider is an incredible book. Camus wrote it during the war, administering the final touches in occupied France. The novel nonchalantly presents an alien way of relating to the world. It makes the reader experiencea philosophical perspective in a way that is far more convincing than formal argument. Although Camus never identified as an existentialist, this novel perfectly encapsulates existentialism as a philosophy that precedes philosophy. Existentialism describes the state of being that causes humans to philosophise in the first place. Based on the success of The Outsider, it seems this state is best communicated as an experience rather than a set of rules.

The Outsider makes the reader yearn for rules. It compels one to clean and tidy and reach out to old acquaintances. The protagonist, Meursault, is utterly without direction. He does not lack a present motivation – he receives this from the environment via light, temperature, texture, sensation – but rather he has never confronted the origins of human motivation. He begins his story by telling us his mother died today or maybe yesterday (he can’t be sure). He then visits and buries his mother; works at his job; goes to a holiday house; shoots a stranger on the beach; is arrested, tried, imprisoned and executed. The promise of death has no effect on him. In the courtroom and in conversation with a priest, Meursault refuses to show remorse. He feels no need to apologise.

Remarkably, Meursault doesn’t come across as sociopathic. He understands those around him, only fumbles involvement with them. He sees how others respond to the human condition yet can only fake the same stimulus in short bursts, to appease a temporary audience. Meursault is a nonconformist against his will, and a tragic figure because of it. Walking around in his head for just a few days forces the reader to live in the human condition without the critical human impulse to escape towards certainty and a higher purpose. Our occasional waking terror that nothing matters is Meursault’s home. It doesn’t terrify him, though, because it’s all he knows.

If The Outsider were less well executed it might be a distasteful piece of writing. In abridged form it sounds like distilled teenage angst. Yet Camus almost achieves a choral effect with the narrator’s voice. He seems so familiar with Meursault’s plight it’s hard not so see the book as a form of therapy. The feeling intensifies if one reads The Outsider alongside its accompanying essay The Myth of Sisyphus, a somewhat turgid piece that assumes life has no meaning and then asks why everyone doesn’t commit suicide. Throughout the essay, Camus avoids the obvious answers that people don’t see life as meaningless or, failing that, are capable of enjoying its accoutrements in and of themselves. This essay is deeply strange, proportionately as clumsy as The Outsider is effortless and, contextually, bizarrely fixated on suicide during a period of industrial-scale homicide. The two pieces only make sense as crosscutting monologues from Camus’ head and heart, each using a different language to grapple with the same terrifying subject.

The Myth of Sisyphus concludes with the eponymous Sisyphus from Greek myth pushing his boulder up a mountain in the underworld. Camus reassures himself that Sisyphus is smiling despite the pain, finding meaning and passion from simply opposing the farce of his predicament. At that point in time Camus has traversed to the same position as Sartre, albeit in a more visceral, personal and moving fashion. He is remembered, via Hollywood-esque portraits, as one of the coolest men in literature. His catalogue features trendy ideas such as absurdity, revolt and rebellion. Nonetheless, his body of work is more haunting than defiant: between the covers I see thousands of lines of text expended to hopefully escape Meursault’s life.Sartre describes the human condition with a philosopher’s precision. Camus, though, corresponds with the reader from perilously deep within it.

THOUGH CAMUS AND Sartre had very different backgrounds, there was a remarkable symmetry to their thoughts and interests. Sartre distilled the human condition; Camus made the reader endure it. During the war they mapped out the contingency of identity and the anguish of abandonment. But, as professional writers and public figures, they also felt compelled to provide their audience with more useful instructions. After the war, freed from Vichy censors, Sartre and Camus tried to make existentialism relevant to social issues. At this juncture they departed from one another and from the rare quality that makes existentialism a universal philosophy.

Sartre fell into the specific politics of the era. He co-founded the journal Les Temps Modernes and turned the publication into an influential bastion on the left of French politics. In postwar France, communism became a purity test for progressives and Sartre – always hungry for influence – aligned his paper with the cause. He used his editor’s pen to defend Stalin and Mao without proper knowledge of either and spent years trying to reconcile existentialism and communism. Intoxicated by utopia, he abandoned existentialism’s less exciting message of sympathy and shared experience. He justified state-sanctioned murder, repression and propaganda.

Camus was less partisan than Sartre, though no less radical in his own way. He yearned for moderation and peace to an abnormal degree. In his view, life is hard enough without adding dogmatism and organised violence. He was so committed to pacifism it took him years to realise Nazism could not simply be appeased, and longer still to agree that violence against German soldiers was justified. He wrote The Plague, his second novel, and started an accompanying essay called The Rebel as the Allies began the long counteroffensive to Berlin. The Rebel, published in 1951, repudiated all rigid forms of ideology as mere rationalisation of crime and permission for wholesale murder. The essay uses a confusing series of non sequiturs to condemn the French Revolution as unreservedly as fascism.  

Camus’ non-fiction seems to prove – intentionally or otherwise – the impossibility of reasoning from the human condition to a higher purpose. The heart understands the need to escape; the brain must make a leap of faith. Even though he was desperate to smuggle morality and decency into the world, Camus could not balance the Sisyphean boulder described by existentialism. His essays end with proclamations without evidence, pleading that life simply must be so to be worth anything. Notwithstanding this intriguing pattern running through Camus’ work, The Rebel was savaged in Les Temps Modernes for the dreary sin of opposing communism. A public slanging match ensued between the two wartime comrades and they broke contact. There was no reconciliation. Camus died nine years later, in 1960, from a car accident. In the intervening years he was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Sartre visited Russia in 1954 and witnessed the grey horror left by Stalin. Yet he continued to publicly support the Soviet Union. Sartre remained a born-again revolutionary until his death – but a disappointed and increasingly mystical one, looking always for a vista that never materialised. He rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 and spent the last decade of his life composing a minutely detailed critique of Gustave Flaubert. He and de Beauvoir were, more or less, the last standard-bearers of existentialism. Their passing in the 1980s relegated the philosophy from public places to dusty library shelves.

Existentialist ideas are still around and can be seen reflected in the facets of other contemporary philosophies, but the philosophy itself isn’t really alive. Existentialism has few advocates and no real followers. This is probably down to the difference between life and literature. Sartre and Camus were describing an unsettling new worldview to their audience, but to a contemporary reader it seems they are simply outlining the way the world is now. Descriptions of the everyday aren’t terribly exciting. When done as well as Sartre and Camus managed, however, they force one to observe everything taken for granted as though it were new.

THE POET AND critic Clive James called Sartre ‘a devil’s advocate to be despised more than the devil’ and lauded Camus as a man of ‘fundamental honesty’. It is tempting to cast such judgement. From the perspective of their best works, though, the choices each made are beside the point. Existentialism does not judge or make demands. It simply explains the origin of human endeavour. This depiction is invaluable, because so often we forget why others are compelled to act as they do. The realisation that there is nothing essential about us – no permanent identity that resides in an individual or the species – is the void that gives birth to philosophy and politics and every other attempt to create meaning and purpose. The beautiful, confrontational, sometimes chilling diversity of these projects consumes our attention like a black hole, but it is good to be reminded they share a wellspring.

Existentialism is a Humanism and The Outsider map the wellspring. They offer a universal vantage by articulating the only universal experience: the human need to identify oneself and figure out what the world means. After these two masterpieces, Camus and Sartre became fixated on the particulars of personal and political struggle. Their later works lost universality. That is certainly ironic, but it is also mimetic. The same process happens to everyone over the course of a lifetime, in waves and cycles, as we build and lose faith, venture and retreat and collide at random points with the human condition. Humanely, no one suffers these limits alone.

Image credit: Atlas man by Jarakin