EXISTENTIALISM

OF
SARTE AND CAMUS
Introduction

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 ESSENCE
noun/ es-sence

A certain set of core properties that are

necessary, or essential, for a thing to be
what it is.

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 Ancient Greek Philosophy
‘”Part of what it means to be a good human is
to adhere to your essence.”
JEAN- PAUL SARTRE

‘
What came
first…
The chicken or
the egg??
 
 

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 EXISTENTIALISM
✣ Existence precedes Essence
✣ Existentialism is not synonymous to
Atheism.
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 Jean-Paul Sartre
✣ was born at Paris in 1905
✣ focuses upon the construction of a philosophy of existence in
EXISTENTIALISM.
✣ Sartre's early works are characterized by a development of classic
phenomenology.
✣ His purpose is to understand human existence rather than the
world as such. 
✣ Sartre’s existentialism designed first as a philosophy of freedom
and responsibility.

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 EXISTENTIALISM IS A
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS HUMANISM

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 Existentialism was built around a number of key
insights:

One: Things are weirder than we think

“Absurdity of the world”

ABSURDITY
Noun/ ab-surd-ity
✣ The search for Answers in an Answerless world.

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 Existentialism was built around a number of key
insights:

Two: We are Free

✣ “If there are no guidelines for our actions, then each of us is
forced to design our own moral code, to invent a morality to
live by.”
✣ “You might think that there’s some authority you could look to
for answers, but all of the authorities you can think of are fake.”
✣ As Satre said, “Those authorities are really just people like you
-people you don’t have any answers, people who had to figure
out for themselves how to live.

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 Existentialism was built around a number of key
insights:

ANGUISH
Noun/ an-guish
✣ mark of maturity, a sign that we are fully alive and
properly aware of reality, with its freedom, its
possibilities and its weighty choices.

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 Existentialism was built around a number of key
insights:

Three: We shouldn’t live in ‘Bad faith

✣ living without taking freedom properly on board.

BAD FAITH
Noun/ bad faith
✣ A refusal to accept the absurd.

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 Existentialism was built around a number of key
insights:

Four: We’re free to dismantle Capitalism

✣ Allow people to their freedom, by reducing the role
played in their lives by material considerations, money
and property.

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ALBERT CAMUS

I rebel; therefore
I exist. 
 

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November 7, 1913 - November 7, 1913

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 Albert camus

✣  Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913

✣ Albert Camus was a French-Algerian writer best known
for his absurdist works.
✣ Camus became political during his student years.

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✣ He studied in the University of Algiers.
✣ He wrote for the newspaper Alger Républicaine
✣ Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1957. He won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1957.

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 Albert camus

✣ Sartre and Camus have written without knowing the works

that made them famous.
✣ He married with Francine Faure
✣ He died on January 4, 1960, in Burgundy, France.

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THE OUTSIDER

Mersault
✣ Anomie  
✣ He accidentally shoots an
Arab Man
✣ The chaplain persuade him
to remorse
✣ Then he grabs the chaplain
saying…

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“We have freedom to realize we are in a cage but
not quite freedom to escape it”
 The Absurd

✣ There is no pre-ordained meaning of life

✣ No road map; No Book; No Religion can save you
✣ Nihilism
✣ Living in the world of Futile; Life Forgotten, Species
Corrupted, and Violent

“We are caught in a constant attempt to derive meaning from

a meaningless world”
 Three Possible Responses to this
predicament:

Physical Suicide Philosophical Suicide

KILL ONESELF RELIGION AND FAITH

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accept absurdity, or better yet to embrace it, and to continue
living.
 “Life has no meaning but it is enjoyable”

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 The myth of sisyphus
By Albert Camus

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 Sisyphus

✣ The king of Corinth, was infamous for his

trickery, ultimately cheating death twice, which
ultimately led Zeus to sentence him to an eternal
punishment of rolling a boulder up a hill in the
depth of Hades, only for the boulder to roll back
down again.

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✣ In Camus’ view, our actions are also as
meaningless and fruitless just like
Sisyphus’ boulder-rolling.

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 “Feeling the Absurd”
✣ Life is after all not worth living.

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 What is Absurd?
✣ Camus often refers
metaphorically to the feeling
of absurdity as a place of
exile. Once we have
acknowledged the validity of
the perspective of a world
without values, of a life
without meaning, there is no
turning back.
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✣ The absurd is a shadow cast
over everything we do. And
even if we choose to live as if
life has a meaning, as if there
are reasons for doing things,
the absurd will linger in the
back of our minds as a
nagging doubt that perhaps
there is no point.
✣ If there is no reason for doing
anything, how can we ever do
anything?

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✣ Suicide concludes that if life is
meaningless then it is not worth
living.

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✣ Is suicide a solution to the
Absurd?

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 ✣ Face the consequences of the
absurd, rather than accept fully
the idea that life has no meaning.

✣ Camus tells us we should imagine

Sisyphus happy.

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✣ He wanted us to imagine Sisyphus happy so
we ourselves can face the absurdity of life,
and only when we acknowledge the absurd we
can overcome it, and thrive towards some
kind of happiness.

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 The rebel
By Albert Camus

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 Rebel
✣ rises in opposition or armed
resistance against an established
government or ruler
 The Rebel
✣ was published on 1951 by Albert Camus
- a book-length essay which treats both
the metaphysical and the historical
development of rebellion and revolution,
especially Western Europe.
-Camus adopts a riveting existentialist
position on why man rebels.
✣ “What is a rebel? A man who says no, but
whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
He is also a man who says yes, from the
moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion
✣ The rebel rejects how history defines values
and systems.
✣ As long as there are injustices, suspensions of
freedom, and violence of the world, the rebel
will always exist.
✣ "With rebellion, awareness is born."
✣ "In order to exist, man must rebel."
✣ Rebellion - act motivated by concerned
with the common good interest rather
than by self-interest
✣ An act of rebellion is not an egoistic act.

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 ✣ The Rebel as a Warrior and an
Artist
✣ As a Warrior - struggles for the
sake of man's freedom
✣ As an Artist - creating a canvas of
action

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 This is the thrust of Camus’ existential
argument:
✣ Reject what history tells you, and rebel.
✣ Find and create your own values.
✣ To rebel is to become aware.
✣ To become aware is to become free.
✣ To become free is fulfill your purpose.

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 Existentialism is Humanism
By Jean-Paul Sartre

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 L’Existentialisme Est Un Humanisme
✣ First presented as a public lecture at the Club
Maintenant in Paris in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre.
This was a time of great intellectual ferment and
guarded optimism: Paris had been liberated from
the Nazi Occupation and reprisals against
collaborators were being meted out. There was a
sense of the need for a reexamination of the
previously unquestioned foundations of society
and morality. the atom bomb had been dropped for
the first time – evidence of the human capacity for
evil and destruction was everywhere.
Philosophical, and in particular moral, questions
were no longer of merely academic interest.
 Two Kinds of Existentialist

‘Christians’ ‘Atheists’

Karl Jaspers and Heidegger and Sartre

Gabriel Marcel 57
 “Existence Precedes Essence”

✣ A reality capable of making itself exists in the first

instance.
✣ Human Beings have a certain common essence of nature,
namely that they are the beings which make themselves to
be what they become.
✣ “The man first exists, occurs, arises in the world, and it is
defined after […] The man is nothing, he will then, and he
will be such that it will be done. So there is not likely, since
there is no God to conceive”

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 Start from Subjectivity

✣ “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

✣ “Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every man
aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of
his existence rest on him.”
✣ “It is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity.”
✣ Our responsibility is a blessing and a curse. It leads us to
feel things like anguish, forlornness, and despair.

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 Forlornness

✣ Forlornness is the idea that “God does not exist and that we have
to face all the consequences of this.” There is no morality a
priori. There is no absolute right or wrong. There is no ultimate
judge.
✣ “It makes no difference whether God exist or not.”
✣ As Dostoievsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be
possible [permissible].” Without God we have nothing to cling to.
✣ Existentialism does not imply to plunge man in to despair and
anguish. It doesn’t “wear itself out” arguing on God’s existence.

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 EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE
By Jean-Paul Sartre

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 Sartre’s “ Existence precedes Essence”

✣ In French, l'existence précède l'essence

✣ Negates the traditional Western idea of the essence of a
thing is more fundamentally and eternally important than
its existence.
✣ (Sartre) two kinds of being
1. being in itself or l’en-soi
2. being for itself or le pou-soi
 Being in itself ( l’en- soi)

✣ Describes the external world

✣ Something that is fixed, defined by ideas and no reason for its
being.
✣ It is simply there to exist

Ex. The essence of the hammer exists in the mind of the creator even
before it actually exists.

Thus, when it comes to external things essence precedes existence

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 Being for itself ( le pour-soi)

✣ Has no fixed ideas and predefined purpose

✣ it has no fixed and eternal essence
✣ Being for itself is not in- itself. It was not metaphysically
caused by anything.
✣ The consciousness has no definition of essence given to it
in advance.
✣ Ex. Humanity
“ Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. “

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 Christianity and Humanity

✣ Sartre does not believe to the existence of God.

✣ For theists, God exist and that humans’ “essence” existed in the mind of
God.
✣ Sartre believes that humans have no essence and that it was their duty to
find their self-defined essence.
✣ “ Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence”
✣ Humanity is different from external things.
✣ Human should live their lives authentically and according to their will,
but still be mindful of their responsibilities.

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 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
By Jean-Paul Sartre

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 ✣ was published during the
German Occupation in
France
“His single ✣ consists of more than 700
greatest pages
✣ was originally presented
articulation of his as an essay on
existentialist phenomenological
philosophy” consciousness
 INTRODUCTION

SARTRE KANT

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 Phenomena are our
perception of things while
noumena, are the things in
themselves which we have
no knowledge of.

KANT
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 The appearance of a
phenomenon is pure and
absolute.
The noumenon is not
inaccessible—it simply isn’t
there.
Appearance is the only
SARTRE reality.

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 The world can
be seen as an
infinite series of finite
appearances.
SARTRE

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being-in-itself
(en-soi)
being-for-itself
(pour-soi)

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“Man is what he is not and is not
what it is.”

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 “We perceive ourselves being
perceived and come to objectify
ourselves in the same way we are
being objectified.”

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“Thus, the gaze of the other robs us
of our inherent freedom and causes us
to deprive ourselves of our existence
as a being-for-itself and instead learn
to falsely self-identify as a being-in-
itself.”

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 PARADOX
“The for-itself desires to become a being-in-itself,
to be an object of his subjectivity. The for-itself is
consciousness, but the instance of this
consciousness of his own being is an issue, an
irreconcilable fissure between the in-itself and
for-itself.”

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 PARADOX
“I am a nothingness, a
lack, dehumanized by
the other and deceived
even by myself.”
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“I am free, I am
transcendent, I am
consciousness, and I
make the world.”
 CONCLUSION
✣ The most essential characteristic of being is its
intrinsic absence of differentiation and diversity.
✣ Being is a complete fullness of existence, a
meaningless mass of matter devoid of meaning,
consciousness, and knowledge.

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 CONCLUSION
✣ Consciousness is what allows the world to exist.
✣ Consciousness knows what it is only through the
knowledge of what it is not. It knows what isn’t a
being-in-itself thus knowing what it is: a
nothingness, a nihilation of being.

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 CONCLUSION

✣ Yet, to Sartre, despite the fact that the for-itself is

nothing, it exists only in its relation to being and
thus is its own type of is.

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“A man is indeed a useless passion,
but it’s his duty to make himself
worthy of his condition.”

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 Jean-Paul Sartre
vs.
albert Camus

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✣ Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were two Jean Paul Sartre
of the most influential philosophers of the ✣ Burgeois French background
19th century. They met and agreed with the
✣ Nausea, Being and Nothingness,
ideology of the French Revolution at World
War 2, shared sympathies with communism, Imagination
smoked and womanized together and ✣ Unattractive
became very close friends. While Sartre- ✣ influential writer
Camus tandem is considered as the
Albert Camus
foundation of Existentialism, the unison of
friendship and brethren went downhill due to ✣ Poor Algerian family
their different approaches in their ✣ “The Outsider, The Plague, The Fall,
philosophies. The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus
✣ Attractive
✣ Not as influential as Sartre
 Camus and Sartre as existentialists

“I am not what I am.”

✣ existentialist Sartre
“I am a stranger to myself.”
✣ existentialist (absurdist/essentialist/nihilist) Camus

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✣ Simoun de Beauvoir was Sartre’s lover, co-writer and
advisor who slept with Camus. Sartre was displeased
when Camus declines Simoun’s request.
✣ Sartre believed that human’s values are always product of
a choice of that human while for Camus, there is human
nature that limits our freedom.
✣ Sartre sees Marxism as compatible with Existentialism
whereas Camus believed the otherwise.

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✣ Sartre sided on Stalin’s/Soviet Union’s twisted version of
Communism
✣ Camus was against Soviet Union’s communist approach
✣ “I am against a new war. To revolt today means to revolt
against war.” Camus

“Is is alright to sacrifice people for the sake of principles or Is

is alright to sacrifice people for the sake of principles?”

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✣ For Camus, his relationship with Sartre is
outstanding because "the best relationships are those
in which we do not see one another.”
✣ For Sartre, Camus “was probably my last good
friend,”

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 Camus and Sartre:
Existential philosophy
✣ Both of them share the idea of
“What are one supposed to do
with one self's life”
 Existentialism vs. Absurdism

✣ Existentialism
⨳ Through a combination
of awareness, free will,
and personal
responsibility,
⨳ you can construct your
own meaning
⨳ within a world that
intrinsically has none of
its own.
✣ Absurdism
⨳ The search for meaning is
inherently in conflict with
the actual lack of meaning.
⨳ Accept this.
⨳ And simultaneously 
rebel against it,
⨳ by embracing what life has
to offer.

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“No, I am not an existentialist…and the one
philosophical book I have published, The
Myth of Sisyphus, was written against
philosophers called existentialists” -Camus
✣ EXISTENCE PRECEDES
ESSENCE

✣ ESSENCE PRECEDES
EXISTENCE

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 Meaning of Essence, Life and Death

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ESSENCE
 ESSENCE

✣ A certain set of core properties that are necessary

or essential for a thing to be what it is.
✣ “Existence precedes essence”
✣ We are subject not an object.

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What is the meaning of Life?

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 LIFE

✣ Life has no meaning, thus the man is the one that

provides the meaning of his life.
✣ Life is meaningless
✣ “Our lives are meaningless and will remain so”
✣ Enduring the meaningless of life.

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 DEATH

✣ Death is exciting and liberating

✣ It frees us from the universal meaning.
✣ Death is the end.

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CARPE DIEM

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