Ethics & Meta-Ethics · All lessons
If there is no built-in purpose to human life — no plan we were made to fulfil — then how should we live? Existentialism faces that question without flinching, and answers that meaning is not found but made.
For much of history, the meaning of a human life was thought to be given from outside — by God, nature, or cosmic order. As that confidence eroded in the modern age, a stark question came into focus: if nothing hands us a purpose, is anything worth doing at all? Existentialism is the tradition that takes this question as its starting point rather than a threat to be avoided.
Friedrich Nietzsche gave the crisis its sharpest expression. The 'death of God' — the collapse of shared religious belief — risked nihilism, the view that life has no objective meaning or value. But Nietzsche did not celebrate nihilism; he saw it as a danger to be overcome, calling for a courageous creation of new values by those strong enough to affirm life as it is.
The tradition's founding figure, Søren Kierkegaard, insisted that truth for an existing individual is something to be lived, through passionate commitment and choice. A century later Jean-Paul Sartre distilled the core idea into a slogan: existence precedes essence. Unlike a tool, which is made for a purpose fixed in advance, a human being first exists and only then, through choices, becomes something. There is no human blueprint; we author ourselves.
This makes freedom total — and heavy. We are, Sartre said, 'condemned to be free': even refusing to choose is a choice, and we cannot offload responsibility onto our nature, our upbringing, or society. The temptation is to flee this freedom by pretending we have none — treating ourselves as fixed things or mere products of circumstance. Sartre called this self-deception bad faith, and its opposite, owning our freedom honestly, authenticity. Simone de Beauvoir turned these ideas toward ethics and the situation of women, showing how freedom is always lived within a concrete social situation.
What of the gap between our hunger for meaning and a universe that offers none? Existentialists call this the absurd. The response they urge is neither denial nor despair, but a clear-eyed acceptance that lets us go on creating meaning anyway — to live fully, and take responsibility for the meaning we make.