Philosophy
Picture Credits: Gemini AI
Existentialism doesn’t try to explain pain away; it asks what we do when pain blows up all our usual meanings. From Sartre and Beauvoir to Camus and today’s Palestine, the real question becomes: whose suffering do we honour with solidarity, and whose do we quietly step around?
Existentialism
Existentialism’s great insight was to recognise that human existence is always already thrown into situations we did not choose, situations often characterised by suffering, limitation, and death. You find yourself here, now, in this body, with this history, facing these constraints. Phenomenology wanted to bracket these contingencies to get at the essential structures of consciousness. Existentialism said: these contingencies are the vital structures.
This is why existentialism handles pain differently from phenomenology. For Sartre, physical pain is not primarily a problem of description but a revelation of facticity, the brute givenness of our bodily existence that we cannot transcend. When you are in pain, you cannot maintain the phenomenological attitude. You cannot bracket the pain to study how it appears to consciousness because the pain is precisely what disrupts that studious distance. But here is where it gets interesting: Sartre argued that even in pain, we remain free, not free to escape the pain but free in how we take it up, how we give it meaning through our projects and choices. This sounds like it could minimise suffering, but it could fall into the trap of saying “pain is what you make of it”. But Sartre is saying something more subtle: pain is real, utterly honest, and yet how we respond to it matters. The prisoner under torture faces the terrible freedom of whether to speak or stay silent, knowing that either choice carries unbearable consequences.
Simone de Beauvoir pushed this further in The Ethics of Ambiguity. She recognised that Sartre’s freedom could become cruel if applied without attention to material conditions. You cannot tell someone in poverty that they are free when hunger determines every choice. You cannot tell the tortured person that they remain free when pain destroys the very capacity for choice. Beauvoir understood that freedom is always situated, always working within and against constraints that are not equally distributed. This led her to a crucial insight: we are responsible not just for our own freedom but also for creating conditions in which others’ freedom becomes possible. Suffering does not just happen to isolated individuals. It is produced and maintained by social structures, by what Beauvoir called “situations of oppression” that deny people the material and social conditions for genuine choice.
Camus took another route. In “The Plague”, suffering is neither punishment nor test nor opportunity for growth. It is simply absurd- without reason, without purpose, without redemption (with uncanny resemblance to what the world experienced during the recent pandemic). The question is not how to explain it but how to respond to it. Dr Rieux does not treat plague victims because he believes in progress or a divine plan. He treats them because they are suffering and he can help. This is solidarity without transcendence, ethics without a metaphysical foundation.
What existentialism offers, then, is not a better description of pain but different questions about it. Not “what is pain’s structure?” but “how do we respond when meaning collapses?” Not “how does pain appear to consciousness?” but “how do we create meaning when pain has destroyed it?”
Reflection: Sartre, Algeria, and the Limits of Solidarity
Existentialism’s own history carries instructive failures. Sartre, who wrote so powerfully about freedom and oppression, struggled with contradictions in his position on Algeria. While he eventually opposed French colonialism, his path there was hesitant, and even his anti-colonial stance sometimes centred French intellectual anxiety more than Algerian suffering. Camus, born in Algeria, could never fully reconcile his commitment to justice with his attachment to French Algeria, remaining ambivalent about Algerian independence even as he opposed violence. These failures matter because they show how philosophies born from occupation and resistance can still fail to extend solidarity universally. The existentialist insight that we are responsible for creating the conditions for others’ freedom becomes hollow when applied selectively, with some people’s situations of oppression recognised while others are rationalised or denied. This remains relevant today when thinking about Palestine, where the language of freedom and self-determination is often selectively applied, where some occupations are condemned while others are defended or ignored.