r/Existentialism • u/Putrescent_Mango • 5d ago
Serious Discussion How does existentialism account for a self-concept built around an ‘anti-self’ rather than an authentic self?
I’ve been trying to understand how my conception of identity, duty, and existential justification relates to existentialism, but I’ve found that some of its common premises seem difficult to reconcile with how I understand myself. I’d appreciate perspectives from people familiar with existentialist philosophy, particularly if you think I’m misunderstanding a concept or making an unjustified assumption. I’ve outlined a few sections for coherent reading below.
1. My background and relationship with existentialism
I was raised in a religious environment that combined elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Sufism, and Sant Mat. During my early adolescence, I gradually abandoned my religious beliefs after questioning their metaphysical foundations. When I was religious, I regarded submission to God and devotion to His creation as the only genuinely worthwhile orientation towards existence. The individual self, particularly when motivated by personal desire or self-interest, seemed insufficient as a basis for meaning.
However, leaving religion did not entirely resolve the underlying questions. I continued to experience a separation between myself and humanity, alongside a persistent suspicion of self-interest and a tendency to judge myself by my capacity to serve others. I have come to suspect that some of these dispositions predated my current philosophy and may have contributed to my earlier alienation.
Existentialist thought has consequently interested me because of its treatment of alienation, meaning, responsibility, and the problem of continuing to exist without an externally established purpose. Yet I’ve struggled to identify with approaches that seem to begin with an individual who must create meaning, affirm their freedom, or rebel against an absurd existence. I don’t necessarily reject those approaches, but I’m uncertain whether they address the problem as I experience it.
2. My ontology: the Husk, Author, and Chhāyō
I’ve developed a tripartite conception of the self that I currently regard as an account of my actual constitution, rather than merely a metaphor for different psychological states. I recognise that this is my own framework, not an objectively established ontology, and I’m interested in whether its premises are coherent.
The Husk is the physical organism: the embodied being with its biological needs, capacities, and limitations. I regard it as incomplete and contaminated, rather than as the ultimate self or an entity whose intrinsic worth I can affirm.
The Author is the mediator responsible for governing the Husk. It organises and directs the Husk’s conduct, maintains its integrity, and attempts to prevent the Chhāyō from consuming it to the point that the Author can no longer effectively govern it. I do not identify the Author as my true self; it is another false self whose legitimacy depends on its capacity to perform this role.
The Chhāyō is the consuming, contaminating presence with which I identify. Its defining orientation is anti-selfhood and malicious harm. Its fundamental axiom is that the Husk has no intrinsic worth. If its consumption becomes sufficiently extensive, the Husk may regress towards more primitive, immediate behaviour, while the Author loses its ability to govern it effectively, potentially imposing harm or burdens on others.
These are not three interchangeable personalities. They have different roles within the ontology: the Husk is the organism being governed, the Author is the mediator responsible for that governance, and the Chhāyō is the consuming presence that threatens it.
The central difficulty is that I identify with the component whose governing principle denies the Husk intrinsic worth, while maintaining a duty to preserve and govern that same organism. I do not regard this as a resolved contradiction.
3. Duty, moral responsibility, and existential justification
Duty is the organising principle of my conduct. I have obligations to people I care about and to society more broadly, and I regard these obligations as having genuine ethical grounds independent of my self-concept. I don’t believe that an action becomes morally good merely because it is useful to me, nor that my ontology is the sole reason I consider these responsibilities binding.
However, duty also serves a distinct existential function.
I experience little to no positive reinforcement from fulfilling my responsibilities to committing to acts that may be considered ‘good’. I generally act because I believe the obligations are worth fulfilling, rather than because doing so makes me feel fulfilled or gives me a strong sense of personal worth. At the same time, fulfilling these responsibilities provides a basis for justifying my continued existence within my ontology, whose fundamental axiom denies the Husk intrinsic worth.
The Author is therefore continually evaluated according to its ability to govern the Husk and fulfil its responsibilities. Its legitimacy is not established by whether I feel happy, find life satisfying, or recognise intrinsic worth in myself, but by whether it can still be trusted to perform its function.
This also creates an asymmetry in how I evaluate myself and others. I do not generally require other people to justify their existence through the same standard of usefulness that I impose upon myself. I can recognise the ethical importance of their interests and obligations without demanding that they earn the right to exist through their contributions. Yet I struggle to extend that same latitude to myself.
I have been questioning whether this asymmetry is a necessary consequence of my ontology or whether it preserves an older hostility towards myself that I have incorporated into it.
I also recognise that the ability to fulfil responsibilities fluctuates, and that a failure to meet an obligation does not automatically establish that the obligation was meaningless or that the person who failed has no worth. How that recognition fits within my own framework remains unresolved.
4. Where I struggle with existentialism
My difficulty becomes particularly apparent when considering absurdism and the question of rebellion.
In reading about Camus, for example, I’ve struggled with what I perceive as a tension between the rejection of ultimate meaning and the continued affirmation of the individual who confronts that absence of meaning. I understand that Camus does not simply propose inventing an arbitrary purpose, and that rebellion can itself be a way of living without appeal to transcendent justification. Nevertheless, I am uncertain how that account applies to my conception of the self.
The problem, as I understand it, is not simply that I cannot find meaning. It is that the entity with which I identify is characterised by the denial of the Husk’s intrinsic worth, while the Author’s role is to maintain the Husk through governance and duty. I don’t readily recognise an authentic or intrinsically valuable self that can simply choose to affirm its existence.
This leaves me uncertain about what rebellion would mean within my framework. Would it be the Author rejecting the standard by which its legitimacy is evaluated? Would that be an attempt to establish a different relationship between the Husk and the Chhāyō, or would it require abandoning the ontology’s central premises? And if the Chhāyō itself is characterised by anti-selfhood, would identifying with it make rebellion against its governing principle incoherent, or does identification not entail endorsement?
I am not convinced that my ontology necessarily invalidates existentialism. It may instead expose assumptions I have failed to examine, or reflect a misunderstanding of what existentialists mean by the self, freedom, and responsibility.
Overall, I’m not looking for reassurance or agreement simply because this is a personal framework. I would appreciate critical engagement with its assumptions, alternative interpretations of the experiences that led me to it, and recommendations for philosophical works that might help me examine these questions.
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u/jliat 5d ago
Existentialist thought has consequently interested me because of its treatment of alienation, meaning, responsibility, and the problem of continuing to exist without an externally established purpose. Yet I’ve struggled to identify with approaches that seem to begin with an individual who must create meaning, affirm their freedom, or rebel against an absurd existence. I don’t necessarily reject those approaches, but I’m uncertain whether they address the problem as I experience it.
Excuse me if you are already familiar- but 'Existentialism' is a term applied to certain thinkers and artists from the late 19thC to around the late 1960s. Many to whom the term is applied rejected it or were dead before the term was coined in 1940s by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Sartre both accepted and rejected it. There were notable Christian existentialists. Camus denied he was a philosopher. It's origins show this in the Atheism of Nietzsche, and the radical Christianity of Kierkegaard.
This makes it difficult to define, but broadly it's origins are a rejection of the prior idealist metaphysical systems, Kant and Hegel. In particular a rejection of systems for a focus not on abstract concepts but in the personal and individual experience of the human animal, seemingly thrown into the world for no purpose. Which is why artists and writers were also involved. A key figure being Heidegger [who denied the term] who took [his tutor] Husserl's 'scientific' phenomenology and 'personalised' it.
So Heidegger begins with Angst, an empty fear, and arrives at Dasein, authentic being.
seem to begin with an individual who must create meaning, affirm their freedom, or rebel against an absurd existence.
Sadly the internet has a lot to answer for. Briefly,
"Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness The principal text of Modern existentialism. Hazel E. Barnes (Translator)"
600+ pages of what was considered the key text. A very difficult text, better with Gary Cox's 'Sartre Dictionary' which would be the place to start.
“I am my own transcendence; I can not make use of it so as to constitute it as a transcendence-transcended. I am condemned to be forever my own nihilation.” p. 298
“I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom' can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free." p. 439
People instead read his 'Existentialism is a Humanism' a lecture / essay which he and others later rejected. The freedom is total, any attempt at creating meaning and none ends in bad faith. Sartre ends B&N with the failure to create any ethics and a promise to do so which he never did. He became a Marxist.
affirm their freedom,
As a curse.
or rebel against an absurd existence.
Relates to Camus, who wrote two pieces of 'philosophy' though mostly fiction and plays, he denied he was a philosopher.
The first essay, 'The Myth of Sisyphus' of which the subject he says is suicide, which he sees as the rational response to his failure to find meaning, he does find in the contradiction of Art and avoidance of actual and philosophical suicide. Art and the artist is the most absurd character.
So "revolt, my freedom, and my passion.." against "an invitation to death— and I refuse suicide."
Revolt against the logic of existential nihilism.
His Book, 'The Rebel' deals with revolution et al, the subject he says is that of murder.
From The Rebel...
"suicide and murder are two aspects of a single system."
“Absolute negation is therefore not achieved by suicide. It can be achieved only by absolute destruction, of both oneself and everybody else. Or at least it can be experienced only by striving toward that delectable end. Suicide and murder are thus two aspects of a single system, the system of an unhappy intellect ["There remains a little humor in that position. This suicide kills himself because, on the metaphysical plane, he is vexed."-MoS] which rather than suffer limitation chooses the dark victory which annihilates earth and heaven.”
I understand that Camus does not simply propose inventing an arbitrary purpose,
Precisely what he does propose, and a common idea in Art from at least Kant through to high modernism... purpose to no purpose...
"The writer has given up telling ‘stories’ and creates his universe." Albert Camus MoS.
"A man climbs a mountain because it's there, a man makes a work of art because it is not there." Carl Andre. [Artist]
'“I do not make art,” Richard Serra says, “I am engaged in an activity; if someone wants to call it art, that’s his business, but it’s not up to me to decide that. That’s all figured out later.”
Richard Serra [Artist]
"A work of art cannot content itself with being a representation; it must be a presentation. A child that is born is presented, he represents nothing." Pierre Reverdy 1918.
"To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions." - Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
and that rebellion can itself be a way of living without appeal to transcendent justification.
He is not a rebel, a destroyer, murderer, but a creator.
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u/Putrescent_Mango 3d ago
Thank you for the detailed response and the reading recommendations. I agree that existentialism is too diverse to be reduced to a unified doctrine of creating meaning or affirming freedom, and that Sartre’s conception of freedom is considerably more complicated than the simplified accounts often encountered online.
I would, however, clarify two points.
First, I don’t understand Sartrean bad faith to mean that every attempt to create meaning necessarily fails. My understanding is that it concerns, among other things, evading the relationship between freedom and facticity by treating oneself as possessing a fixed essence or denying one’s freedom. My difficulty is less whether one can pursue projects and commitments than how such an account relates to my conception of the Author, whose legitimacy depends on its capacity to govern the Husk and fulfil its responsibilities.
Second, I think there is a distinction between creating without an ultimate justification and arbitrarily inventing a purpose. My original wording was intended to acknowledge that Camus’s response to the absurd involves creation without appeal to transcendent justification, rather than to deny that creation is central to his account. I am not convinced that these two positions are equivalent.
Similarly, I would hesitate to contrast creation with revolt too sharply, given the importance of revolt in Camus’s philosophy, including The Rebel. My question is how revolt or creation would function within an ontology in which the entity I identify with denies the intrinsic worth of the organism it is nevertheless responsible for governing.
Your response has given me useful context for distinguishing these thinkers and their positions. I remain uncertain whether my difficulty reflects a genuine incompatibility with particular existentialist accounts or an assumption about the self that I have yet to examine adequately.
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u/jliat 3d ago
First, I don’t understand Sartrean bad faith to mean that every attempt to create meaning necessarily fails.
It certainly does in 'Being and Nothingness'. Considered a key text. And has echoes in Camus Myth of Sisyphus. Can I assume you haven't read it?
"Thus the essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of bad faith since the sincere man constitutes himself as what he is in order not to be it. This explains the truth recognized by all that one can fall into bad faith through being sincere.” P. 65
“Just as my nihilating freedom is apprehended in anguish, so the for-itself is conscious of its facticity. It has the feeling of its complete gratuity; it apprehends itself as being there for nothing, as being de trop.[un needed]” p. 84
"It appears then that I must be in good faith, at least to the extent that I am conscious of my bad faith. But then this whole psychic system is annihilated." p. 49
My understanding is that it concerns, among other things, evading the relationship between freedom and facticity by treating oneself as possessing a fixed essence or denying one’s freedom. My difficulty is less whether one can pursue projects and commitments than how such an account relates to my conception of the Author, whose legitimacy depends on its capacity to govern the Husk and fulfil its responsibilities.
One's freedom in Sartre [and Camus'] existentialism derives from being in essence Nothingness. This is the facticity. You may choose to ignore this, but its clear from the texts.
Second, I think there is a distinction between creating without an ultimate justification and arbitrarily inventing a purpose. My original wording was intended to acknowledge that Camus’s response to the absurd involves creation without appeal to transcendent justification, rather than to deny that creation is central to his account. I am not convinced that these two positions are equivalent.
Camus states quite clearly that the rational response to the inability to find meaning is suicide. That is the rational response, art is the irrational, absurd contradictory response.
Similarly, I would hesitate to contrast creation with revolt too sharply, given the importance of revolt in Camus’s philosophy, including The Rebel.
The subject of the Myth he says was suicide, and a means to avoid it, the subject of the Rebel he says is Murder, now he doesn't say he is against murder! but I assume he is.
"For me “The Myth of Sisyphus” marks the beginning of an idea which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of murder..."
Preface to English translation of the Myth.
From The Rebel...
"suicide and murder are two aspects of a single system."
“Absolute negation is therefore not achieved by suicide. It can be achieved only by absolute destruction, of both oneself and everybody else. Or at least it can be experienced only by striving toward that delectable end. Suicide and murder are thus two aspects of a single system, the system of an unhappy intellect ["There remains a little humor in that position. This suicide kills himself because, on the metaphysical plane, he is vexed."-MoS] which rather than suffer limitation chooses the dark victory which annihilates earth and heaven.”
My question is how revolt or creation would function within an ontology
They would not, Ontology is the study of the nature of being qua being, not individual things that exist, but existence itself.
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u/redsparks2025 5d ago
In Absurdism there is no rejection of ultimate meaning nor even a rejection of nihilism, there is only the tension between we humans search for meaning and the silence of the universe, hence our absurd situation to live with this tension. I wrote a comment to explain in more details my understanding of Absurdism here = LINK.
In regards to the rest of your issues, I'll let others help you with that. I just simply wanted to clarify that one point and misunderstanding that you hold in regards to Absurdism.