Camus or Sartre? The Absurd, Radical Freedom, and How to Act Inside the Anguish

The first thing to clear up about Albert Camus is that “the absurd” does not simply mean “life has no meaning.” That’s the lazy version, and it misses what makes the idea precise.

For Camus, the absurd is a relation, not a property. On one side: the human being, who comes equipped with an apparently incurable demand for sense, clarity, and unity — we cannot help asking why. On the other side: a universe that returns no answer. The absurd is neither in us nor in the world; it is born in the confrontation between the two — Camus describes it as the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. He liked the word divorce: a divorce needs two parties.

This is why the absurd cannot be “solved” from only one side. Prove tomorrow that the cosmos has a hidden purpose, and the absurd dissolves; convince a human to genuinely stop demanding sense, and it dissolves too. Camus thought neither is honestly available to us.

He also described, with unsettling accuracy, how the absurd usually shows up: not in a philosophy book but in a crack in routine. Rising, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep — Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday in the same rhythm — until one day, for no reason, the why arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. This is exactly the moment my whole question in Part 1 circled around: the person following the “current goal” is, in Camus’ picture, someone for whom the stage set hasn’t collapsed yet.

A note on labels: Camus is constantly filed under existentialism, but he forcefully rejected the label, considering his “philosophy of the absurd” a different project — closely related, but with a different center of gravity. The difference will matter in a moment.

[IMAGE: a minimal two-panel illustration of the absurd as a relation — a small human figure shouting “WHY?” toward an enormous, blank, starry sky; the gap between them labeled “the absurd.” Caption: not in us, not in the world — in between.]

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens with one of the most famous first lines in philosophy: there is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Camus means it structurally: if life truly has no given meaning, the first question is whether it is worth living at all. Everything else comes after.

He examines the available exits and rejects them all. Physical suicide doesn’t answer the absurd; it just eliminates one of its two terms. The subtler exit — the one most people take — he calls philosophical suicide: the leap into a religion, a doctrine, an ideology, anything that fills the silence with a transcendent answer. The term sounds aggressive, but his target is precise: the moment you accept a system because it relieves you of the absurd, you have stopped being lucid. You haven’t answered the question; you’ve abolished it. Strikingly, Camus aimed this accusation at the existentialist philosophers themselves — those who, in his words, deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them.

What’s left, if both exits are closed? Revolt: keep living, fully and passionately, while keeping the absurd in view — refusing both the lie of a fabricated meaning and the surrender of despair. Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a boulder uphill forever, knowing it will always roll back, is the emblem: ceaseless effort, no final result, no cosmic reward. And then the famous, much-misunderstood conclusion: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because he pretends the boulder isn’t there — but because in the full, lucid consciousness of his condition, the struggle itself becomes his own, and “his fate belongs to him.”

When I first compressed this to “make peace with it and move on,” the compression lost the essential thing: revolt is not quiet acceptance. It is a permanent, almost combative tension — living as much as possible, eyes open, refusing to look away even for a second. That distinction turns out to be the key to the Camus–Sartre question below.

[COMIC: Sisyphus pushing the boulder. Panel 1: a passerby — “you know it’ll roll back down, right?” Panel 2: Sisyphus — “yes.” Panel 3: passerby — “so why are you smiling?” Panel 4: Sisyphus, mid-push — “because it’s MY boulder.”]

Jean-Paul Sartre is the one who claimed the existentialist label — to the point of writing its manifesto, the 1945 lecture published as Existentialism Is a Humanism. His starting formula: existence precedes essence.

For an object like a paper-knife, essence comes first: someone conceives its purpose, then it exists. For the human being, Sartre says, it’s reversed. We exist first — thrown into the world with no blueprint, no divine plan, no fixed human nature — and only afterwards, through our choices, do we define what we are. There is no manual. From this follows his most quoted line: we are “condemned to be free.” Condemned, because the freedom is inescapable — even refusing to choose is a choice — and so we are responsible, without alibi, for what we become.

This is where his concept that hit closest to home for me appears: mauvaise foi, bad faith. Bad faith is hiding your own freedom from yourself — pretending to be determined by a role, a habit, an expectation. His famous example, from Being and Nothingness (1943): the café waiter whose gestures are a little too precise, a little too waiter-like — he is playing at being a waiter, trying to become his role the way a thing is a thing, because a thing doesn’t have to choose. As Sartre puts it, I can be a waiter only “in the mode of being what I am not.”

Read through this lens, the person who follows the “current path” — student, then degree, then the job one gets — without ever asking what it means to them, may be doing something more active than not-thinking. They may be taking refuge in the external structure precisely to avoid the vertigo of being free, and therefore responsible, for everything. The structure functions as an alibi.

Sartre’s practical conclusion, though, is not “stop and contemplate.” It’s the opposite: engagement. Since no meaning is given, go create it — through concrete actions, commitments, projects, relationships — and carry the full responsibility for what you build. Which sounds like it should be compatible with Camus. And here is exactly where my objections started.

When the two positions were first laid out for me as alternatives — Camus’ anguish facing a silent universe versus Sartre’s anguish of total responsibility — I didn’t buy it. They didn’t look mutually exclusive. Both could be true at once. And I think that objection holds.

The two descriptions point in different directions, but at the same void. For Camus, the discomfort lives in the relation between the person and the world: a question — why all this? — shouted outward, met with silence. For Sartre, the discomfort lives in the relation between the person and themselves: there is no one — no God, no human nature, no script — who can decide in my place, so every choice is fully mine, with no excuses.

But look at the logical structure: the absence of a cosmic order (Camus’ starting point) is precisely what produces radical freedom (Sartre’s starting point). Same vacuum, two vantage points. One looks outward — the world doesn’t answer. The other looks inward — then it’s on me, and I can’t offload the responsibility onto anyone.

In lived experience they don’t just coexist; they arrive together. The moment the illusion of an externally given meaning collapses is exactly the moment you realize, with a specific kind of terror, that the ball has passed entirely to you. The Camusian silence and the Sartrean vertigo are two faces of one event.

So the real difference between the two philosophers is not in the diagnosis — on that, they largely agree. It’s in the prescription. Which is where my second objection comes in, and where the disagreement turns out to be real, but located somewhere more interesting than I first thought.

My first map of the disagreement was: life has no meaning; Camus says make peace with it and move on; Sartre says then create it. It captures something — but it flattens Camus’ position into passivity, and the flattening hides the actual fault line.

Camus’ “making peace” is not serene resignation. His revolt is a state of permanent, lucid, almost belligerent tension — live as intensely as possible while staring straight into the void. In practice, that looks a lot like Sartre’s “go create”: both tell you to act, live fully, commit. Camus simply refuses to call the result “meaning,” because for him living intensely doesn’t resolve the divorce between you and the world — it only inhabits it.

The real disagreement appears one step later, and it’s sharper. For Camus, the danger arrives when created meaning hardens into a system — a project, an ideology, a cause that tells you “this is what’s worth living and dying for.” At that point, in his eyes, you’ve committed philosophical suicide again, just dressed in atheism and freedom instead of religion. The historical rupture between the two men exploded on exactly this terrain: Sartre had moved toward Marxism as a project of historical meaning, while Camus, in The Rebel (1951), attacked precisely those “created meanings” that become absolutes capable of justifying violence and terror in the name of the end. The book was savaged in Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes — first in a long review by Francis Jeanson, then by Sartre himself — and the public exchange of letters in 1952 ended one of the most famous friendships in twentieth-century thought. Underneath the politics sat the philosophy: Camus rejected revolutionary violence justified by history’s supposed direction; Sartre considered that refusal a luxury of clean hands.

So the more precise formula is not “accept vs. create.” It is: stay in the tension without ever closing it versus commit fully to a project, accepting the risk that it becomes a new illusion. And each man’s position exposes a real weakness in the other’s. Sartre’s implicit reply to Camus is hard to dismiss: permanent lucidity is itself almost impossible to sustain — at some point, to live and act in the world, you must commit to something, knowing it’s a wager, not a truth. Camus’ reply to Sartre proved tragically prescient in the same decade: total commitments have a documented tendency to stop being wagers and start being licenses.

I no longer think you have to pick a side. The two positions work better as mutual correctives: commit like Sartre, audit yourself like Camus.

[IMAGE: a simple spectrum/see-saw diagram — left end: “permanent lucidity, no commitment hardens” (Camus, risk: unsustainable, paralysis); right end: “total commitment to a created project” (Sartre, risk: the project becomes a new absolute). A marker in the middle labeled “commit as a wager, keep auditing.”]

This was, for me, the most practical and most urgent question in the whole topic: granted the diagnosis, how do you escape the anguish enough to do anything? Two Sartrean distinctions, plus Simone de Beauvoir, reframed it almost completely.

First: for Sartre, anguish is not a problem to be solved before acting — it is the condition of acting. It isn’t that anguish comes first and action follows once you’ve eliminated it; authentic action carries anguish, because every real choice includes the awareness that you could have chosen otherwise and that nothing guarantees it’s right. So the question “how do I escape the anguish?” is probably inverted. You don’t escape it; you learn to act inside it — the way you learn to speak in public not by eliminating the racing heartbeat but by speaking anyway. The anguish doesn’t vanish; it stops being paralyzing and becomes the background noise of someone who knows they’re responsible.

Second: Sartrean freedom is never freedom in a void — it is always situated. Sartre distinguishes facticity (the body, history, era, relationships, abilities and limits you did not choose) from transcendence (your capacity to project beyond them). Bad faith, notably, comes in two forms: denying your freedom (“I can’t do anything about it”), but also denying your facticity (“I can be anything just by wishing it”). This second point quietly demolishes the paralyzing image of infinite options. You are not asked to invent a meaning from nothing in an abstract space of all possible lives. You are asked to decide what to do starting from this specific life — this body, these people, these abilities, this moment. That is a dramatically smaller, more tractable problem than “pure” freedom.

Third: Simone de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), took on the accusation that existentialism gives no guidance and built the missing ethics. Her core move: my freedom is not exercised in isolation — willing my own freedom coherently entails willing the freedom of others, a logic of reciprocity and responsibility. Freedom that crushes other freedoms contradicts itself. For the practical question “what should I commit to?”, this at least draws a boundary and an orientation: projects that open possibilities — yours and others’ — over projects that close them. Of the whole Parisian circle, she is arguably the one who worked hardest on precisely my question: not whether we’re free, but how to live it without either paralysis or fanaticism.

None of this dissolves the anguish. Frankly, all three would say that wanting it dissolved is the old wish for a guarantee, wearing new clothes.

Around the middle of the twentieth century, a current of psychology took these philosophical ideas seriously as clinical material. Existential psychology — associated with figures like Rollo May, Irvin Yalom and Viktor Frankl — starts from a simple but radical premise: a significant part of psychological suffering doesn’t come from childhood trauma or chemical imbalance, but from the confrontation with certain given conditions of existence.

Yalom, in his foundational 1980 textbook Existential Psychotherapy, organized these into the four ultimate concerns: death, freedom (and the responsibility it drags with it), existential isolation (however close we get to others, no one can experience our life from inside), and meaninglessness. You will recognize the cast: this is Heidegger’s being-toward-death, Sartre’s condemnation to freedom, and Camus’ silent universe, translated into a therapist’s vocabulary. The clinical claim is that much everyday anxiety is existential anxiety in disguise — fear of death dressed as performance anxiety, the vacuum of meaning dressed as chronic boredom.

Frankl arrived at the same territory through the darkest possible route. A Viennese psychiatrist deported to Auschwitz and other camps, he observed that prisoners who maintained a sense of meaning — a person to return to, a work to finish, a stance to keep — seemed better able to endure than those who lost it. From this he built logotherapy, resting on the claim that the primary human drive is not pleasure (Freud) or power (Adler) but the will to meaning. His 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning became one of the most widely read books of the century. Two honest cautions, though: his camp observations are testimony, not controlled data, and shouldn’t be cited as if they were a study; and his framework is one influential theory among others, not settled science.

What’s quietly remarkable is Frankl’s practical answer, because it lands close to where the philosophers did: meaning, he argued, is found in acting — in work, in love, in the stance one takes toward unavoidable suffering — far more than in abstract contemplation. Which loops back to where Part 1 started: maybe the people who never explicitly ask the question, but live engaged lives, were never as far from the answer as the framing suggested.

More than I expected when I started. First: the Camus–Sartre fault line — commit fully versus never let commitment harden — is not resolved; it may be unresolvable, and each side still names a real failure mode of the other. Second: whether Camus’ permanent lucidity is psychologically sustainable for an actual human being over an actual lifetime is an empirical question philosophy can’t settle from the armchair. Third: existential psychology’s central claim — that much ordinary suffering is disguised existential anxiety — is clinically influential but hard to test rigorously; how much of it would survive strict empirical scrutiny is open. And finally, the question that started everything is still standing, just sharper: if meaning lives more in engagement than in contemplation, is the unexamined life following the “current goal” a quiet success or a quiet evasion? I suspect the honest answer is: it depends on what happens the day the stage set cracks — and that day isn’t optional. The thinkers in this series disagree on almost everything except this: it’s better to have thought about it before.