DE Weekly: The Anxiety of Choice, Despair, & Genuine Free Will

In Existentialism, freedom is one of the basest conditions of human existence that contributes to our human nature. Our freedom is as radical as it is inescapable; as humans, the existentialists would say, we have no predetermined purpose or meaning, meaning it up to us to define our essence through our own choices.

In writing that we are “condemned to be free,” Jean-Paul Sartre was emphasizing the true inescapability of the level of our radical freedom. That we are unable to shirk this level of sheer responsibility for our own lives might lead to despair.