Best Books on Existentialism: Sartre, Camus, and Beyond â€“ Skriuwer.com

What Existentialism Actually Is (And Is Not)

Existentialism has been stripped of its real meaning by decades of misuse. It does not mean you should do whatever you want. It does not mean life has no meaning, though existentialists did argue that life has no given meaning that you can inherit from tradition or religion. It means that existence comes before essence, that you are not born with a predetermined nature, and that you are responsible for what you make of yourself. It is a philosophy of radical freedom and radical responsibility, which is why it feels so unsettling.

The term itself was popularized in post-war France, particularly by Jean-Paul Sartre, but the mood preceded the label. Kierkegaard asked the existential questions in the 19th century. Nietzsche did. Dostoevsky did. Camus rejected the label even as he wrote its most important texts. What tied them together was not a unified system but a recognition that philosophy must begin with the concrete reality of individual human existence, not with abstract principles or inherited certainties.

The books that follow are not meant to be beginners' guides. Existentialism resists being summarized. It must be confronted directly, in texts that ask hard questions and do not offer comfortable answers.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

This is the definitive existentialist text, and it is also nearly impossible to read. Sartre wrote it over several years while hiding from the Germans during the occupation of France, and it shows: the book is dense, systematic, and sometimes seems to be in conversation with itself. But the central argument is clear enough: consciousness is distinct from being. Things have essence (they are what they are). Humans have only existence. We are "condemned to be free," which means we are responsible for everything we choose, and we cannot escape that responsibility by claiming we are merely products of our circumstances.

Sartre spends hundreds of pages working through the consequences. Bad faith is the state of denying your own freedom, pretending you are a thing with a fixed nature when you are actually a being who must continually create itself through choices. We fall into bad faith constantly because freedom is terrifying and it is easier to pretend we have no choice. But that pretense is always a choice.

Read the selections rather than the whole book if you are new to Sartre. But read Sartre. Most philosophy of the 20th century is either in dialogue with him or in reaction to him.

Albert Camus, The Absurd Reasoning

Camus rejected the existentialist label and his relationship with Sartre ended in bitter dispute. But his two major philosophical essays, "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "The Rebel," define existentialism as much as anything Sartre wrote. Camus' central concern was the absurd: the collision between human need for meaning and the universe's apparent refusal to provide it. We want our lives to be significant. The cosmos does not care whether they are.

The image of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a mountain forever is Camus' emblem of the human condition. The task is meaningless, eternal, and impossible to escape. Camus' answer is not despair but defiance. Imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because his task becomes meaningful, but because he accepts the absurdity and finds freedom in the acceptance. There is a dignity in continuing anyway, in creating meaning in a universe that provides none.

Camus also argued that certain kinds of protest against the absurd lead to totalitarianism. If you are convinced that the universe is meaningless but that you alone understand what true meaning would be, you become dangerous. The Rebel is partly a critique of communism, written from a left-wing perspective, and it aged better than most 1950s political philosophy.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Existentialism was a male-dominated movement. Beauvoir's revolutionary response was to apply existentialist philosophy to the condition of women, and the result is the most important philosophical text of the 20th century on gender. She begins with a simple observation: man is defined as the subject, the one who acts and creates meaning. Woman is defined as the other, the object defined by her relation to man. This is not biological. It is existential. Women have been denied the freedom to create their own essence, to become subjects of their own existence.

The first half of The Second Sex traces how this condition came to be. The second half is Beauvoir's meditation on what women might do about it. She argues that economic independence is necessary but not sufficient. Women must choose to become themselves. They must reject the role of the other. This is not easy because the entire structure of society reinforces it.

The book is long, explicit, sometimes dated, and still the foundation of any serious conversation about freedom and gender.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

This is not a philosophy book in the systematic sense. It is something closer to philosophical fiction, a monologue by a bitter, intelligent, alienated man who has spent years trying to make sense of his own existence. Dostoevsky published it in 1864, well before existentialism had a name, but it contains existentialism in embryo: the recognition that human beings are not rational creatures who can be improved by systems, that freedom matters more than happiness, that consciousness itself is a kind of suffering.

The protagonist has rejected utopian ideology because it denies human freedom. He is convinced that people will choose irrational, self-destructive acts rather than accept a perfectly rational but unfree existence. Reason alone cannot explain human behavior because we are not simply rational. We want to want, to choose, to create ourselves, even if the result is misery.

Read this before Sartre. It contains the mood and intuitions that Sartre later formalized.

Why This Still Matters

Existentialism fell out of fashion. Post-structuralism, deconstruction, and various -isms came after. But the basic questions remain unanswered and unanswerable: What am I responsible for? What do I do in a universe that provides no meaning? How do I become free in a world shaped by forces I did not choose? These are the questions every person must face eventually, whether they read existentialist texts or not.