Existence Precedes Essence

John Paul Sartre once wrote; "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world- and defines himself afterwards". Existential thought suggests that the only thing that is already here in the world is existence. It is then down to the individual to determine whether they are a good or bad person through their actions, that human essence is determined through life choices. There are no existing values in the world, the individual, through their own consciousness to determine their own values.

In Albert Camus' novel The Stranger, the main protagonist, Mersault, refuses to conform to common society's ideas and refuses to show emotion over both the death of his mother, and later when he murders an Arab man for no reason, other than he felt like doing it. Regret is redundant for Mersault as an existentialist thinker. There is no point in regretting something because you live in the present. The past does not matter and the future has not happened. There is no point to anything in the world, there are no reactions because of actions. Life is made up of sensory experiences, the only absolute truth is death, with other relative truths (religion etc.) being meaningless.

Camus actually rejected that he was an existentialist, stating that his works focused on absurdism, which can be easily related to existentialism. This way of thought suggested that humans seeking to find reason and order in a meaningless, irrational universe will bring the two into a direct, absurd conflict. Similarly existentialism suggests that a person cannot understand the world just through knowledge, rather, sensory experiences and life choices determine a persons life values and shows whether a person lives their life collaborating with bad faith.