# What Problem Was Existentialism Actually Answering?

From Nietzsche's "God is dead" to Sartre's "existence precedes essence": how meaning shifted from something received to something produced, and why that follows structurally rather than as a slogan.

> Nietzsche · Sartre · Camus · About 9 min · Oct 6

## Key points

1. Existentialism's central problem is not "is life meaningless?" but "what follows once the framework that guaranteed meaning has collapsed?"
2. The older model treated meaning as received: essence precedes existence, as with a paper-knife whose design and purpose are fixed by its maker before it is made.
3. Classical and medieval thought applied that model to human beings — Aristotelian telos plus a creator God meant each person was an instance of a pre-existing conception of "man."
4. Nietzsche's "God is dead" (The Gay Science §125) is a report on a cultural event, not a boast; the madman's audience is atheists who laugh, and he admits, "I have come too early."
5. §343 supplies the actual argument: European morality was built on the belief in God, so undermining the belief undermines the justification, even while the habits survive — the consequences arrive later than the event.
6. That lag between the collapse of the guarantee and the arrival of its consequences is the space existentialism works in.
7. Sartre's "existence precedes essence" inverts the artifact model: if no artisan exists, there is no conception of human nature, so a human being exists first and defines itself afterwards.
8. The practical result is not "anything goes" but "no excuse": no fixed nature and no moral order above humanity can absorb responsibility for what you do.
9. Freedom for Sartre is an inescapable condition ("condemned to be free"), not an achievement; not choosing is a choice, and pretending to be a fixed thing is bad faith.
10. Making meaning means that your deliberate actions constitute what you are, not that you select a satisfying personal project.
11. Sartre marks a hard boundary himself: the existentialist finds God's absence "extremely embarrassing" because it removes any "luminous realm of values," and "no essence in advance" does not mean "no situation or constraints."
12. Camus's absurd is a relation, not a mood or a property of the world: it is the divorce between the human demand for meaning and the world's unreasonable silence; he refuses both suicide and the leap to faith.
13. The label is loose and late: Marcel coined "existentialism" in 1943, Sartre publicly adopted it on 29 October 1945, and only Sartre and Beauvoir self-identified; Kierkegaard is a Christian, Heidegger denies the label, Camus refuses it.
14. Historical context matters: the Occupation and postwar reckoning made excuseless choice concrete, which is why the argument became a public phenomenon in 1940s Paris.
15. "God is dead" does not entail nihilism; it removes one guarantee, and Nietzsche's own aim was to keep its absence from being confused with the absence of all value.

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Most popular introductions present existentialism as a set of moods and slogans: angst, absurdity, radical freedom, "be authentic." Those are answers. The problem they answer is more specific, and it is historical. In the space of about sixty years, European philosophy went from "the meaning of your life is already settled, and your job is to find it" to "there is nothing in the universe that could settle it, so you have to produce it." Existentialism is largely the attempt to think through that shift rather than mourn it. This piece traces the shift from Nietzsche's diagnosis to Sartre's formula, and works out why the "making" of meaning is not an option but a structural consequence.

## The arrangement that was in place: meaning as something received

Start with a distinction Sartre made famous, because it names the two possible orders of things.

Consider a paper-knife. Before anyone cuts paper, a craftsman has a conception of it: this is what it is for, this is how it is made. Its essence — the sum of its defining properties and purpose — is fixed in advance, and then this particular object comes into existence as an instance of that conception. For an artifact, essence precedes existence.

Traditional Western thought about human beings ran on the same structure. Aristotle held that everything has a *telos*, a function it is for; for a human being the function is rational activity, and living well means performing it well. Medieval Christianity welded this onto a creator. If God is the artisan, then the conception of "man" in the divine mind is the human essence, and each of us is a particular realization of it.

What matters here is not whether this was true, but what it did to the question "how should I live." The answer existed before you did. Your task was discovery and conformity: find out what a human being is for, and be that. Meaning was something you received.

Sartre's sharp observation in *Existentialism Is a Humanism* is that dropping God did not by itself change this. Eighteenth-century atheists like Diderot and Voltaire, and even Kant, kept the idea of a "human nature" that every person merely exemplifies. The theism went; the essentialism stayed. So the real dividing line is not theism versus atheism but whether there is an essence waiting for you in advance.

## Nietzsche's diagnosis, and why it arrives late

In *The Gay Science* (1882), §125, a madman runs into the marketplace crying "I seek God!" and is laughed at by people who no longer believe. He answers them:

> "Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. […] God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." [1]

Two details matter more than the famous line. First, the madman is not celebrating. He is appalled, and his audience — atheists — does not understand him. Second, he acknowledges the gap himself: he throws down his lantern and says, "I have come too early; my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men."

That gap is the whole point. In §343 Nietzsche explains it: "God is dead" means that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable — a cultural event, not a metaphysical thesis — and then he asks "how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality." [2]

Unpack that. European morality did not merely happen to coexist with belief in God; it was *justified* by that belief. If the reason you had for treating every person as bearing a God-given dignity was that God conferred it, then the reason is gone even if the habit of treating people that way remains. Nietzsche is diagnosing, not deducing: he is not proving that no secular ethics is possible. He is saying that the supporting beam has been removed and the building has not yet noticed, so people will keep living inside a moral architecture whose foundation they no longer accept. The event has happened; its consequences for how people understand themselves have not arrived.

That interval — between the collapse of the guarantee and the arrival of its consequences — is the room existentialism occupies. Existentialism is not primarily a reaction to atheism. It is what you get when you stop waiting for the ground to grow back.

One caution: Nietzsche is not an existentialist. He had his own proposals (the revaluation of values, the *Übermensch*). His contribution to this story is the diagnosis that makes the problem unavoidable.

## Sartre's inversion

Sartre's argument takes Nietzsche's diagnosis and turns it into a claim about human beings. If God is the "supernal artisan" and human nature is the conception in the divine understanding, then with no artisan there is no conception — and with no conception, there is no essence to instantiate. In his words:

> "Atheistic existentialism […] declares […] that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. […] Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards. […] Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism." [3]

Now follow the consequences, because this is where "meaning has to be made" stops sounding like a motto and starts sounding like a structural result.

**There is no excuse.** "One will never be able to explain one's action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism — man is free, man is freedom." And, since there are no values written anywhere above humanity: "We have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. — We are left alone, without excuse." [3] Read carefully, this is not "you may do anything." It is that no appeal to your nature or to a moral order can relieve you of responsibility for what you do. The absence of a guarantee is also the absence of a scapegoat.

**Freedom is a condition, not an achievement.** Sartre's phrase is that we are "condemned to be free" — condemned because we did not create ourselves, yet are answerable for what we do with ourselves. Not choosing is itself a choice; invoking your temperament or your circumstances as an explanation is itself a commitment, and Sartre has a name for the maneuver of pretending to be a fixed thing so as to be exempt: *bad faith*, developed in *Being and Nothingness* (1943).

**"Making meaning" is not a hobby.** It does not mean picking a project to feel good about. It means that whatever you knowingly do is the substance of what you are, and no background process will supply the content.

Two boundaries are worth marking. First, this is the opposite of cheerful nihilism: Sartre says the existentialist finds it "extremely embarrassing that God does not exist," because with God goes any possibility of "finding values in an intelligible heaven." [3] Second, "no pre-given essence" does not mean "no constraints." Sartre insists on situation — body, history, position, circumstance — and later moved toward a more situated freedom and into Marxism. No essence in advance, but plenty of conditions.

One more caveat: the lecture also argues that in choosing for myself I choose an image of man for everyone. That universalizing step is the most contested part of the text; Heidegger attacked it in his *Letter on Humanism* (1946), and Sartre himself later softened it. Treat it as Sartre's argument at that moment, not as the movement's shared core.

## Camus: the absurd is a relation, not a mood

Popular writing often flattens "the absurd" into "the universe is meaningless." Camus is more precise. In *The Myth of Sisyphus* (1942):

> "The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." And: "The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation." [4][7]

So the absurd is not a property of the world, and not a psychological state of the person. It is the mismatch between a demand for meaning and a world that does not answer. That is a different claim from nihilism, which is a verdict about the world's value. Camus's response is to refuse both escape routes: suicide, which tries to abolish one term of the relation, and the "leap" into faith, which he calls philosophical suicide. What remains is revolt, freedom, and passion — lucidity without consolation. His problem has the same source as Nietzsche's (the absence of God), but he refused the existentialist label.

## Who's who, and why the label is loose

The term itself is late and partly accidental. It was coined by Gabriel Marcel in 1943 when he applied it to Sartre, who initially rejected it and then publicly adopted it on 29 October 1945 in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris, published the next year. Of the thinkers usually grouped under it, only Sartre and Beauvoir called themselves existentialists. [5][6]

- **Kierkegaard** (1840s) supplies the earliest move: against Hegel's system, which explained everything as a moment of a whole, he insisted on the existing individual who has to live rather than merely contemplate. His "subjectivity is truth" is a claim about how a truth must be appropriated, not a claim that all opinions are equal — and he was a Christian, for whom the decisive step is a leap of faith.
- **Nietzsche** supplies the diagnosis; he is not a member.
- **Heidegger** (*Being and Time*, 1927) analyses the structure of existence — *Dasein*, thrownness, being-toward-death — and is not offering an ethics of choice. He later denied being an existentialist and rejected Sartre's humanism.
- **Sartre** turns the diagnosis into a program, with the atheism doing real work.
- **Beauvoir** (*The Second Sex*, 1949) gives the cleanest application: where a social arrangement pretends to be a natural fact, she argues that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" — existence preceding essence, applied to a category that claimed an essence.
- **Camus** analyzes the absurd and refuses the label.

What the umbrella actually collects is a shared starting point — begin from the existing individual rather than from a system — plus deep disagreement on nearly everything else.

## Why this crystallized in 1940s Paris

The intellectual collapse Nietzsche described met a concrete test. Occupation, collaboration, and resistance made "that is just my nature" and "those were my orders" look like what they were. Sartre's lecture came one week after French voters went to the polls in 1945, and existentialism became the first media craze of the postwar era. [6] The historical point is not decorative: a claim about what happens when a cosmic guarantee disappears becomes urgent only when people are actually forced to decide without one.

## The shape of the answer

The chain runs like this. Meaning was received because a conception preceded existence; a conception requires an author; the author's disappearance removes the conception; so nothing remains that could hand you the answer; so the task shifts from discovery to production. What feels like a burden is precisely the removal of the premise that made the burden unnecessary. The price is that justification cannot be outsourced. The compensation, on Sartre's account, is that this freedom is not a privilege anyone granted and no one can revoke.

Two things this does not settle. Existentialism as a whole does not require atheism — its religious members make a related claim about the existing individual without accepting Sartre's version. And "God is dead" does not by itself entail that nothing matters; it removes one specific guarantee, and Nietzsche's own project was to prevent its absence from being mistaken for the absence of all value.

## Sources

1. [German History in Documents and Images — full English text of The Gay Science §125, "The Madman"](https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/forging-an-empire-bismarckian-germany-1866-1890/friedrich-nietzsche-pronounces-god-is-dead-the-gay-science-1882.pdf)
2. [Course excerpt from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, including §343 on "the whole of our European morality"](http://faculty.winthrop.edu/oakesm/PHIL101/Web1/readings/Nietzsche.pdf)
3. [Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945 lecture, trans. Philip Mairet) — paper-knife argument, "existence precedes essence," "condemned to be free"](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm)
4. [Scholarly discussion of Camus's concept of the absurd, with the "unreasonable silence of the world" and "the absurd is essentially a divorce" quotations](https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil489/files/2018/03/1_The-Absurd.pdf)
5. [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Existentialism" — on the term's origin and the movement's lack of a unifying doctrine](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/)
6. [Modern Intellectual History — the political context of Sartre's 1945 Club Maintenant lecture](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/abs/humanist-pretensions-catholics-communists-and-sartres-struggle-for-existentialism-in-postwar-france/E0087260A817F873C4DF9DFAD8F99739)
7. [Excerpts and commentary on Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, including the response to the absurd](https://www.tfreeman.net/resources/Phil-360/16.-Myth-of-Sisyphus.pdf)

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Original article: https://eulore.ai/articles/why-meaning-had-to-be-made-3b26b264

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