Camus, Sartre, and the Questions of Meaning and Freedom
*last updated on October 5, 2026
Lately, I have been thinking about Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre—not only about their ideas, but about their relationship. For a time they were friends and leading figures in the same postwar intellectual milieu; eventually they became adversaries. Their public rupture in 1952 crystallized disagreements over communism, revolution, violence, and the political responsibilities of intellectuals, but underneath those political disagreements were deeper questions they had both been asking for years: What does it mean to live in a world without a predetermined purpose? How free are we to choose what we do? What follows from that freedom? And how should we act toward other people?
Camus and Sartre are often grouped together under the broad umbrella of existentialism, although Camus himself rejected that label. What interests me is not deciding how closely they belong to the same philosophical school. It is the way their ideas intersect, diverge, and illuminate questions that have also become central to my own work. Camus makes me think about meaning and meaninglessness. Sartre makes me think about freedom, constraint, choice, and responsibility. And putting the two thinkers beside each other helps me see my own position more clearly.
Camus’s idea of the absurd is sometimes simplified into the claim that life is meaningless. But the absurd is more relational than that. It emerges from the encounter between human beings, who want clarity, coherence, justification, and meaning, and a universe that does not provide the answers we are looking for. We ask; the universe remains silent. Camus’s response is not to despair or to invent a consoling answer. It is to remain lucid—to live fully without pretending that the silence has disappeared.
There was a period when this way of seeing reality felt quite close to my own. I have written elsewhere about how I used to imagine humans as meaning-making creatures trying to impose order on a fundamentally chaotic and indifferent universe. I did not think of myself as following Camus. In fact, I was not consciously thinking about him at all. But looking back, I recognize the resemblance.
I no longer see things quite that way. My growing engagement with Buddhism, and with spirituality more broadly, changed something—not my scholarly understanding that humans construct meanings, but my relationship to the reality within which this construction happens. I still do not believe that I can identify some objective meaning of the universe or demonstrate scientifically that it has a purpose. What changed is more difficult to articulate. Indifference no longer feels like the only intellectually honest description available to me. Spirituality, as I understand it now, is not an explanation of the universe so much as an orientation toward uncertainty, impermanence, connection, and things I cannot know.
And yet Camus remains important to me precisely because the experience he describes is so recognizable. Humans seem to have an extraordinary need for things to make sense. Meaninglessness is rarely experienced as a neutral blank. Confusion and incoherence can feel destabilizing; when something does not fit our understanding, our minds immediately start trying to organize it. Camus takes this ordinary human need and pushes it toward its existential limit. What happens when the question is not What does this event mean? but What does any of this mean? What happens when the meaning-making mind confronts something too large to organize?
There is also something in Camus that still intersects with my thinking even after my relationship to meaninglessness has changed. His refusal to manufacture certainty matters to me. Meanings may be indispensable, but that does not turn them into essences. The fact that we need interpretations does not mean our interpretations are written into the universe. In my own work, I keep returning to the dangers that appear when meanings harden into things that seem absolute and unquestionable. Camus approaches this problem from a very different direction, but I recognize something familiar in his insistence on living without pretending to possess guarantees.
Sartre starts from nearby territory and then moves somewhere different. His famous formulation that “existence precedes essence” also rejects the idea that human beings arrive with a predetermined nature or purpose. But where Camus remains focused on the tension between our demand for meaning and the silence of the world, Sartre places extraordinary weight on what humans do in that situation. If there is no script telling us what we are supposed to become, then we are involved in making ourselves through our choices. This is part of what he means when he says that human beings are “condemned to be free.” Freedom is not simply a pleasant opportunity. It is a burden from which we cannot completely escape, because even refusing to choose is itself a way of responding to a situation.
This is where I have recently become especially interested in comparing Sartre’s thinking with my own. I tend to begin from almost the opposite direction. Sartre begins with freedom and asks what happens to freedom inside a situation. I begin with constraint and ask how much freedom remains.
The difference is not as absolute as that formulation makes it sound. Sartre did not imagine people floating outside history, bodies, social circumstances, or previous choices. His concept of facticity refers precisely to the conditions we find ourselves in and did not simply choose away. His account of bad faith can even operate in two directions: we can deceive ourselves by pretending that our circumstances determine us completely, but we can also deceive ourselves by behaving as though circumstances impose no limits at all.
Still, the starting point matters. Sartre’s philosophical attention keeps returning to freedom. Mine keeps returning to constraint: biology, upbringing, emotion, habit, language, culture, institutions, relationships, limited self-knowledge, and meanings we inherited before we were capable of examining them. From there I ask: inside all of this, where can a person move?
My answer has become what I call wiggle room. I do not experience human agency as a wide-open field in which we freely create ourselves. I imagine it as a shifting opening inside constraint. Sometimes the opening is large. Sometimes it may consist of only a pause, a slightly different response, or the possibility of noticing a familiar pattern before following it again.
This is also where I find an important intersection with Sartre. His concept of bad faith includes the possibility that we hide our agency from ourselves: I could not do anything else. This is just who I am. I had no choice. I am uncomfortable with turning bad faith into another accusatory category, because we often cannot know how much choice another person actually experienced in a particular situation. But I share Sartre’s resistance to the opposite extreme—the idea that because we are constrained, agency disappears altogether. Constraint can narrow choice enormously without reducing a human being to a passive object.
And this is why freedom matters morally for Sartre. His emphasis on choice is not simply an exuberant declaration that we can do whatever we want. Freedom carries responsibility. We participate, through what we do and fail to do, in making ourselves and shaping the human world. Sartre’s insistence on responsibility therefore intersects with something important in my own thinking: acknowledging constraint cannot become a way of abandoning the possibility of change.
Where I diverge is in how confidently responsibility can be assigned from the outside. If agency is something like wiggle room, we usually do not know exactly how large another person’s opening was. We see an action; we do not see all the fear, conditioning, habits, meanings, pressures, alternatives, and limitations that shaped what appeared possible from inside that person’s experience. This does not make responsibility meaningless. It makes judgment less simple. Responsibility can coexist with humility about what we do not know.
The political and philosophical disagreements that culminated in Camus and Sartre’s public rupture in 1952 make the stakes of these differences especially visible. Camus increasingly insisted on limits: rebellion against injustice could not be allowed to become a justification for systematic killing in the name of a future society. He was not an absolute pacifist; he recognized circumstances in which violent resistance might become unavoidable. But he rejected the idea that a promised future good could simply cleanse violent means of their moral significance. Sartre, by contrast, became much more willing during parts of his political life to defend revolutionary or anticolonial counter-violence in struggles he considered emancipatory. From 1952 to 1956 he supported, though never joined, the French Communist Party; after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, he ended his support for the Party and increasingly distanced his socialism from the Soviet model, although he did not thereby abandon Marxism, revolutionary politics, or the possibility of political violence.
Here I find myself much closer to Camus. I do not believe that violence stops being violence because it has been attached to a noble meaning. Protection may sometimes require force; immediate circumstances can create terrible choices. But an imagined future—justice, liberation, equality, peace—cannot by itself transform harm into something morally clean. This is also where Camus’s thinking intersects with one of my recurring concerns about meaning: meanings can guide ethical action, but they can also make harmful action appear necessary, righteous, or inevitable.
There is another connection here that I find interesting, although I want to be careful not to turn it into a claim that Camus was somehow Buddhist. There is scholarship arguing that Camus had direct exposure to Indian thought—including the Bhagavad Gita—and noting references in his notebooks to the Buddha and other Indian traditions. That does not establish Buddhism as a major source of his philosophy. What I notice is a narrower resonance. Neither the absence of permanent guarantees nor the instability of meanings leads automatically to moral indifference. Camus moves from the absurd toward revolt, solidarity, and limits. Buddhist traditions approach suffering through very different philosophical and spiritual frameworks, but they too ask how to act wisely in a world characterized by impermanence and conditions we cannot completely control. Ethical action does not have to wait until reality provides us with perfect certainty.
Thinking about Camus and Sartre together therefore leaves me in an interesting place. Camus warns me about what can happen when human beings become too certain of the meanings that justify their actions. Sartre warns me about what can happen when human beings treat their circumstances as if those circumstances eliminated their capacity to act. I want to keep both warnings.
Meanings are made, but they matter. We are constrained, but we are not merely programmed. Our choices have consequences, but we rarely understand all the conditions surrounding another person’s choice. Responsibility matters, but it does not require us to imagine a perfectly autonomous chooser standing outside biology, history, emotion, culture, or circumstance.
For me, these questions ultimately return to something practical: how we look at people. If we imagine complete freedom, judgment becomes easy: You chose this. You should have known better. If we imagine complete determination, responsibility disappears: Nothing could have been different. Neither picture seems adequate. Between them is the much messier human condition—people making meanings they did not invent from scratch, acting inside situations they did not fully choose, and still possessing some capacity, however uneven, to notice, respond, resist, repair, and change.
Perhaps that is the space in which compassion becomes most necessary. Not because actions do not matter, but precisely because they do—and because understanding what produces them is so much harder than judging them.
About this project: Start page
Lately, I have been thinking about Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre—not only about their ideas, but about their relationship. For a time they were friends and leading figures in the same postwar intellectual milieu; eventually they became adversaries. Their public rupture in 1952 crystallized disagreements over communism, revolution, violence, and the political responsibilities of intellectuals, but underneath those political disagreements were deeper questions they had both been asking for years: What does it mean to live in a world without a predetermined purpose? How free are we to choose what we do? What follows from that freedom? And how should we act toward other people?
Camus and Sartre are often grouped together under the broad umbrella of existentialism, although Camus himself rejected that label. What interests me is not deciding how closely they belong to the same philosophical school. It is the way their ideas intersect, diverge, and illuminate questions that have also become central to my own work. Camus makes me think about meaning and meaninglessness. Sartre makes me think about freedom, constraint, choice, and responsibility. And putting the two thinkers beside each other helps me see my own position more clearly.
Camus’s idea of the absurd is sometimes simplified into the claim that life is meaningless. But the absurd is more relational than that. It emerges from the encounter between human beings, who want clarity, coherence, justification, and meaning, and a universe that does not provide the answers we are looking for. We ask; the universe remains silent. Camus’s response is not to despair or to invent a consoling answer. It is to remain lucid—to live fully without pretending that the silence has disappeared.
There was a period when this way of seeing reality felt quite close to my own. I have written elsewhere about how I used to imagine humans as meaning-making creatures trying to impose order on a fundamentally chaotic and indifferent universe. I did not think of myself as following Camus. In fact, I was not consciously thinking about him at all. But looking back, I recognize the resemblance.
I no longer see things quite that way. My growing engagement with Buddhism, and with spirituality more broadly, changed something—not my scholarly understanding that humans construct meanings, but my relationship to the reality within which this construction happens. I still do not believe that I can identify some objective meaning of the universe or demonstrate scientifically that it has a purpose. What changed is more difficult to articulate. Indifference no longer feels like the only intellectually honest description available to me. Spirituality, as I understand it now, is not an explanation of the universe so much as an orientation toward uncertainty, impermanence, connection, and things I cannot know.
And yet Camus remains important to me precisely because the experience he describes is so recognizable. Humans seem to have an extraordinary need for things to make sense. Meaninglessness is rarely experienced as a neutral blank. Confusion and incoherence can feel destabilizing; when something does not fit our understanding, our minds immediately start trying to organize it. Camus takes this ordinary human need and pushes it toward its existential limit. What happens when the question is not What does this event mean? but What does any of this mean? What happens when the meaning-making mind confronts something too large to organize?
There is also something in Camus that still intersects with my thinking even after my relationship to meaninglessness has changed. His refusal to manufacture certainty matters to me. Meanings may be indispensable, but that does not turn them into essences. The fact that we need interpretations does not mean our interpretations are written into the universe. In my own work, I keep returning to the dangers that appear when meanings harden into things that seem absolute and unquestionable. Camus approaches this problem from a very different direction, but I recognize something familiar in his insistence on living without pretending to possess guarantees.
Sartre starts from nearby territory and then moves somewhere different. His famous formulation that “existence precedes essence” also rejects the idea that human beings arrive with a predetermined nature or purpose. But where Camus remains focused on the tension between our demand for meaning and the silence of the world, Sartre places extraordinary weight on what humans do in that situation. If there is no script telling us what we are supposed to become, then we are involved in making ourselves through our choices. This is part of what he means when he says that human beings are “condemned to be free.” Freedom is not simply a pleasant opportunity. It is a burden from which we cannot completely escape, because even refusing to choose is itself a way of responding to a situation.
This is where I have recently become especially interested in comparing Sartre’s thinking with my own. I tend to begin from almost the opposite direction. Sartre begins with freedom and asks what happens to freedom inside a situation. I begin with constraint and ask how much freedom remains.
The difference is not as absolute as that formulation makes it sound. Sartre did not imagine people floating outside history, bodies, social circumstances, or previous choices. His concept of facticity refers precisely to the conditions we find ourselves in and did not simply choose away. His account of bad faith can even operate in two directions: we can deceive ourselves by pretending that our circumstances determine us completely, but we can also deceive ourselves by behaving as though circumstances impose no limits at all.
Still, the starting point matters. Sartre’s philosophical attention keeps returning to freedom. Mine keeps returning to constraint: biology, upbringing, emotion, habit, language, culture, institutions, relationships, limited self-knowledge, and meanings we inherited before we were capable of examining them. From there I ask: inside all of this, where can a person move?
My answer has become what I call wiggle room. I do not experience human agency as a wide-open field in which we freely create ourselves. I imagine it as a shifting opening inside constraint. Sometimes the opening is large. Sometimes it may consist of only a pause, a slightly different response, or the possibility of noticing a familiar pattern before following it again.
This is also where I find an important intersection with Sartre. His concept of bad faith includes the possibility that we hide our agency from ourselves: I could not do anything else. This is just who I am. I had no choice. I am uncomfortable with turning bad faith into another accusatory category, because we often cannot know how much choice another person actually experienced in a particular situation. But I share Sartre’s resistance to the opposite extreme—the idea that because we are constrained, agency disappears altogether. Constraint can narrow choice enormously without reducing a human being to a passive object.
And this is why freedom matters morally for Sartre. His emphasis on choice is not simply an exuberant declaration that we can do whatever we want. Freedom carries responsibility. We participate, through what we do and fail to do, in making ourselves and shaping the human world. Sartre’s insistence on responsibility therefore intersects with something important in my own thinking: acknowledging constraint cannot become a way of abandoning the possibility of change.
Where I diverge is in how confidently responsibility can be assigned from the outside. If agency is something like wiggle room, we usually do not know exactly how large another person’s opening was. We see an action; we do not see all the fear, conditioning, habits, meanings, pressures, alternatives, and limitations that shaped what appeared possible from inside that person’s experience. This does not make responsibility meaningless. It makes judgment less simple. Responsibility can coexist with humility about what we do not know.
The political and philosophical disagreements that culminated in Camus and Sartre’s public rupture in 1952 make the stakes of these differences especially visible. Camus increasingly insisted on limits: rebellion against injustice could not be allowed to become a justification for systematic killing in the name of a future society. He was not an absolute pacifist; he recognized circumstances in which violent resistance might become unavoidable. But he rejected the idea that a promised future good could simply cleanse violent means of their moral significance. Sartre, by contrast, became much more willing during parts of his political life to defend revolutionary or anticolonial counter-violence in struggles he considered emancipatory. From 1952 to 1956 he supported, though never joined, the French Communist Party; after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, he ended his support for the Party and increasingly distanced his socialism from the Soviet model, although he did not thereby abandon Marxism, revolutionary politics, or the possibility of political violence.
Here I find myself much closer to Camus. I do not believe that violence stops being violence because it has been attached to a noble meaning. Protection may sometimes require force; immediate circumstances can create terrible choices. But an imagined future—justice, liberation, equality, peace—cannot by itself transform harm into something morally clean. This is also where Camus’s thinking intersects with one of my recurring concerns about meaning: meanings can guide ethical action, but they can also make harmful action appear necessary, righteous, or inevitable.
There is another connection here that I find interesting, although I want to be careful not to turn it into a claim that Camus was somehow Buddhist. There is scholarship arguing that Camus had direct exposure to Indian thought—including the Bhagavad Gita—and noting references in his notebooks to the Buddha and other Indian traditions. That does not establish Buddhism as a major source of his philosophy. What I notice is a narrower resonance. Neither the absence of permanent guarantees nor the instability of meanings leads automatically to moral indifference. Camus moves from the absurd toward revolt, solidarity, and limits. Buddhist traditions approach suffering through very different philosophical and spiritual frameworks, but they too ask how to act wisely in a world characterized by impermanence and conditions we cannot completely control. Ethical action does not have to wait until reality provides us with perfect certainty.
Thinking about Camus and Sartre together therefore leaves me in an interesting place. Camus warns me about what can happen when human beings become too certain of the meanings that justify their actions. Sartre warns me about what can happen when human beings treat their circumstances as if those circumstances eliminated their capacity to act. I want to keep both warnings.
Meanings are made, but they matter. We are constrained, but we are not merely programmed. Our choices have consequences, but we rarely understand all the conditions surrounding another person’s choice. Responsibility matters, but it does not require us to imagine a perfectly autonomous chooser standing outside biology, history, emotion, culture, or circumstance.
For me, these questions ultimately return to something practical: how we look at people. If we imagine complete freedom, judgment becomes easy: You chose this. You should have known better. If we imagine complete determination, responsibility disappears: Nothing could have been different. Neither picture seems adequate. Between them is the much messier human condition—people making meanings they did not invent from scratch, acting inside situations they did not fully choose, and still possessing some capacity, however uneven, to notice, respond, resist, repair, and change.
Perhaps that is the space in which compassion becomes most necessary. Not because actions do not matter, but precisely because they do—and because understanding what produces them is so much harder than judging them.
About this project: Start page
