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Purpose, Freedom, and the Search for Meaning

Sisyphus, by Titian
Sisyphus, by Titian. The ancient image of a meaningless life—and, perhaps, of a meaningful one.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The question of the meaning of life is perhaps one that we would rather not ask, for fear of the answer or lack thereof.

Still today, many people believe that humankind is the creation of a supernatural entity named God, that God had an intelligent purpose in creating us, and that this intelligent purpose is ‘the meaning of life’.

I do not propose to rehearse the well-worn arguments for and against the existence of God, and still less to take a side. But even if God exists, and even if He had an intelligent purpose in creating us, no one really knows what this purpose might be, or whether it is especially meaningful.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system—including the universe itself—increases up to the point at which equilibrium is reached, and God’s purpose in creating us, and indeed all of nature, might have been no loftier than to catalyse this process much as soil organisms catalyse the decomposition of organic matter. In a word, we may be no more than complex fungi or enzymes.

If our God-given purpose is to act as super-efficient heat dissipators, then having no purpose at all is better than having this sort of purpose—because it frees us to be the authors of our purpose or purposes and so to lead truly dignified and meaningful lives.

In fact, following this logic, having no purpose at all is better than having any kind of pre-determined purpose, even more traditional, uplifting ones such as serving God or improving our karma.

In short, even if God exists, and even if He had an intelligent purpose in creating us (and why should He have had?), we do not know what this purpose might be, and, whatever it might be, we would rather be able to do without it—or at least to ignore or discount it.

For unless we can be free to become the authors of our own purpose or purposes, our lives may have, at worst, no purpose at all, and, at best, only some unfathomable and potentially trivial purpose that is not of our own choosing.

Can We Really Create Our Own Purpose?

You might object that not to have a pre-determined purpose is, really, not to have any purpose at all.

But this is to assume that for something to have a purpose, it must have been created with that particular purpose in mind, and, moreover, must still be serving that same original purpose.

Many things acquire purposes that were never intended for them.

Many Junes ago, I visited the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the South of France. One evening, I picked up a rounded stone called a galet which I took back to Oxford and put to good use as a bookend.

In the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, these stones serve to capture the heat of the sun and release it back into the cool of the night, helping the grapes to ripen. Of course, these stones were not created with this or any other purpose in mind. Even if they had been created for a purpose, it would almost certainly not have been to make great wine or serve as bookends.

That same evening over a rabbit stew, I invited my friends to blind taste a bottle of Bordeaux—an evil trick, given that we were in the Southern Rhône. To disguise the bottle, I slipped it into one of a pair of socks.

Unlike the galet, the sock had been created with a definite purpose in mind, albeit one very different from (although not strictly incompatible with) the one that it came to assume on that idyllic evening.

The point I’m driving at is that purpose need not be fixed at the moment of creation: it can also emerge afterwards.

What If the Meaning of Life Lies Beyond This Life?

But this raises a related question. Can meaning come from us at all? Or must it come from somewhere beyond us—whether from the intention of a creator or from a life beyond this one?

Many would argue that the meaning of life lies beyond this life, which is merely a prelude to some eternal afterlife.

However, I can marshal at least four arguments against this position:

  • It is not at all clear that there is, or even can be, some form of eternal afterlife that entails the survival of the personal ego.
  • Even if there were such an afterlife, living forever is not in itself a purpose. The concept of the afterlife merely displaces the problem to one remove, begging the question: what then is the purpose of the afterlife?
  • Reliance on an eternal afterlife not only postpones the question of life’s purpose but also dissuades or at least discourages us from determining a purpose or purposes for what may be the only life that we do have.
  • If it is the brevity or finiteness of human life that gives it shape and purpose (an argument associated with the philosopher Bernard Williams), then an eternal afterlife cannot, in and of itself, have any purpose.

So, whether or not God exists, whether or not He gave us a purpose, and whether or not there is an eternal afterlife, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

Existence Before Essence

To translate this into Sartrean (or existentialist) terms, whereas for the galet it is true only that existence precedes essence, for the sock it is true both that essence precedes existence (when the sock is used on a human foot) and that existence precedes essence (when the sock is used for an unintended purpose, for example, as a bottle sleeve).

We human beings are either like the rock or the sock, but whichever we are like, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

In fact, let me correct myself. We human beings are neither like the rock nor the sock—because capable of discovering and creating meanings.

This echoes Kant’s insistence that human beings are not merely means to some external end, but self-determining ends in themselves. It is this capacity for autonomy—for rationally determining our own ends—that gives us our special dignity.

Human life may not have been created with any pre-determined purpose, but this need not mean that it cannot have a purpose, or that this purpose cannot be just as good as, if not much better than, any pre-determined one.

And so the meaning of life, of our life, is that which we choose to give it.

But how to choose?

Camus and Nietzsche

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for daring to defy the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. 

Yet Camus reaches one of the most startling conclusions in all philosophy: ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, and embracing it, he at the same time transcends it.

The tragedy of Sisyphus became the very source of his freedom. The universe may not provide us with a ready-made meaning, but this need not prevent us from creating one, and living with dignity, courage, and even joy.

Nietzsche, too, challenged us to embrace our fate, even to love it. In Ecce Homo, he wrote, ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.’

How to Find Meaning

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl (d. 1997) wrote about his experiences during the Second World War.

Tellingly, Frankl found that those who survived longest in the concentration camp were not those who were physically strong, but those who retained a sense of inner freedom and purpose.

He observed:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.

Frankl’s message is ultimately one of hope: even in the most absurd, painful, and dispiriting of circumstances, life can still be given a meaning, and so too can suffering.

Life in the concentration camp taught Frankl that our deepest drive is neither pleasure, as Freud had argued, nor power, as Adler had maintained, but meaning.

After his release, Frankl founded the school of logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning ‘reason’ or ‘principle’), which is sometimes referred to as the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ for coming after those of Freud and Adler. The aim of logotherapy is to carry out an existential analysis of the person, and, in so doing, to help them uncover or discover meaning for their life.

According to Frankl, meaning can be found through:

  1. Experiencing reality by interacting authentically with the environment and with others.
  2. Giving something back to the world through creativity and self-expression, and,
  3. Changing our attitude when faced with a situation or circumstance that we cannot change.

‘The point,’ said Frankl, ‘is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.’

The Final Freedom

Whether or not God exists, whether or not He created us for a purpose, and whether or not there is an afterlife, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

We began with a fear: that if life has no pre-determined purpose, it must be meaningless. But it now seems, the opposite is true. A purpose imposed upon us from outside may give us a goal, but not necessarily meaning—for meaning requires that we recognise and embrace it as our own.

The meaning of life is not hidden in the stars, waiting to be discovered like buried treasure. Nor is it handed to us at birth. Instead, it emerges from our attitudes and choices. 

Thus, it is more of an activity than a state—something that we create, discover, and renew throughout our lives.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Gang of Three or The Art of Failure.

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And His Challenge to Us: The Übermensch

NIetzsche's tightrope walker over an abyss
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 13 August 2026.

In 1882, Nietzsche entered into a love triangle with the beautiful Lou Salomé and their friend Paul Rée. On Nov. 5, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, nor why. Some days later, when what had happened had sunk in, he confided to his friend Franz Overbeck, ‘So I really am going into utter solitude.’ He never saw Salomé or Rée again.

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent out letters mentioning overdoses and suicide. On Christmas Day, he wrote to Overbeck: ‘This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew… Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.’

Fortunately, Nietzsche did discover the alchemical trick, and the result was his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterward was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call Thus Spoke Zarathustra the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

The book is an act of self-overcoming of the kind that Nietzsche came to preach. Out of rejection, illness, and despair, he produced his magnum opus. He turned muck into gold.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is written as a stylised, biblical, and poetic narrative about a prophet, Zarathustra, who isolates himself in the mountains with his animals, a snake and an eagle. After ten years of solitude, he comes down to share his wisdom with humanity in the form of speeches, parables, and aphorisms. When the masses laugh at him, he recruits an elite band of followers.

But he remains ambivalent about having followers: ‘You are my believers, but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves, and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore, all faith amounts to little.’ He instructs his followers to leave him and become free thinkers: ‘I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only then… will I return to you.’

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and, consequently, the inability of conventional religion and morality to provide modern man with structure and meaning. Instead, the prophet Zarathustra advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy. In so doing, Zarathustra introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes, including the Übermensch and Last Man.

The death of God presents us with both a crisis and a choice. If our inherited values can no longer sustain us, we must either create new values of our own or retreat into self-deception, conformity, and comfort. We can be Last Men, or rise towards the Übermensch.

The Übermensch

Zarathustra exhorts his followers to remain faithful to the earth. Instead of harbouring otherworldly hopes, they should embrace life as it is and take responsibility for creating their own values. The meaning of the earth is the Übermensch, a higher, self-overcoming type of human that is yet to exist.

The Übermensch is sometimes misunderstood as a biologically superior ‘Superman’, or as someone who seeks power over other people. But Nietzsche’s emphasis is on power over oneself: on self-creation, self-mastery, and, above all, self-overcoming.

Humanity is not an end, but a bridge between its animal past and its Übermensch future. Humanity is a ‘rope over an abyss’—’a dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still’—that most people fail to cross, falling instead into nihilism, that is, into despondency and mediocrity.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end in himself: what can be loved in man is that he is a going over and a going under.

Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, daß er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist: was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, daß er ein Übergang und ein Untergang ist.

Zarathustra delivers these words to a crowd that has gathered to watch a tightrope walker, who sets out along a rope stretched between two towers. The performance ends in disaster: the tightrope walker loses his footing and plunges into the void. The safe alternative would have been not to cross at all.

Although the Übermensch is a future concept—not even Zarathustra is an Übermensch—in later works Nietzsche discusses certain ‘higher men’ who approached the ideal, like Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, Goethe, and Beethoven. The Übermensch rises above the conventional morality of the herd to become a law unto himself.

The Last Man

The antithesis of the Übermensch is the Last Man, a mediocre, apathetic, comfort-seeking creature who fears risk and struggle and chooses security over greatness. Without the drive to create or achieve, the Last Man focuses only on ‘little pleasures for the day and little pleasures for the night’ while maintaining a strict regard for his health. Unlike the tightrope walker, he lacks the gumption, or even the vision, to cross and risk himself.

Have you noticed how, when people are overwhelmed, they start blinking? Nietzsche famously describes the Last Man as ‘blinking’—because his vision of humanity is so small.

Last Men, who are in the overwhelming majority, arrange things so that everyone is like them, so that no one rises, or even can rise, above the herd, so that no one can dare to dream or risk having an original thought. Any deviation from the norm is interpreted as a form of madness.

Zarathustra challenges the complacency of the herd:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Übermensch. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

Wo ist der Blitz, der euch mit seiner Zunge lecke? Wo ist der Wahnsinn, der mit euch ausgeimpft werden müsste? Seht, ich lehre euch den Übermenschen: er ist dieser Blitz, er ist dieser Wahnsinn.

Ironically, the crowd does not heed the warning, but cheers and demands that Zarathustra make them into these Last Men.

Nietzsche’s Last Man marks the end of human evolution and ambition. It is a prophetic warning of what humanity could become if it settles for nothing higher than material wealth, risk-aversion, technological pacification, and a culture of feeling ‘safe and happy’—in one word, for mediocrity.

The prophecy is disturbing because the Last Man does not appear miserable. On the contrary: he has engineered his world to minimise discomfort. But in removing danger, struggle, solitude, and uncertainty, he has also removed many of the conditions under which a person might overcome himself and be and become so much more.

For Nietzsche, becoming a person is not a matter merely of ‘discovering who we are’, when we are still nobody. It is the harder task of creating ourselves: of questioning inherited values, thinking our own thoughts, choosing what is worth suffering for, and accepting the danger of the rope over the abyss.

Nietzsche was writing in 1883. Since then, it has become ever more difficult to be free. I have seen it in my own lifetime. Very soon, if not already, it will be impossible to become a person.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

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What If You Had to Live Your Life Again?

Sisyphus, by Titian.
Sisyphus, by Titian (c. 1548–1549). Like Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return, the myth of Sisyphus challenges us to embrace a life that endlessly repeats itself.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

What if you had to live your life again, exactly as before? Nietzsche’s eternal return is the ultimate test for measuring a life well lived.

Imagine this. Tonight a daemon appears at your bedside.

The daemon tells you that every moment of your life—every joy, every disappointment, every triumph, every humiliation, every love, every regret—must be lived again, exactly as it has been, over and over, for all eternity.

Would you despair?

Or would you rejoice?

Most people associate this thought experiment with Nietzsche. It is, in fact, much older. Long before Nietzsche, the Stoics imagined a universe in which everything returns.

Under the influence of Plato, who was himself influenced by Pythagoras, who was himself influenced by India, the Stoics held that the universe undergoes cycles, being periodically destroyed in a great conflagration (ekpyrosis, ‘blow-out’) and then reborn, ad infinitum.

Because God, being perfectly rational, is bound to make the same choices, each cosmic cycle unfolds as the last. Thus, the world as we know it, with us in it, existed before and will exist again. In around 200 CE, the Peripatetic (Aristotelian) philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote, ‘[Chrysippus and the Stoics] hold that after the conflagration all the same things come to be again in the world numerically, so that even the same qualified individual as before exists and comes to be again in the world…’

Maybe, in ten trillion years, I will once again be sitting at this desk, writing these words, with the same cat asleep on my lap.

The Roman Stoic Seneca hints at the same idea when, in his famous Letters, he writes to Lucilius:

Things that vanish from our sight are merely stored away in the natural world: they cease to be, but they do not perish… the day will come again that will return us to the light. It is a day that many would refuse, except that we forget everything before returning.

Whether the Stoics thought of eternal return as literal cosmology or as a philosophical exercise scarcely matters. Its enduring power lies in the challenge that it poses.

Nietzsche’s Challenge to Us

In July 1881, Nietzsche discovered his arcadia in Sils-Maria, a place of ‘splendid isolation’. For one Swiss franc a day, he took an upstairs room in the house of Gian Durisch, the mayor of the village. The following month, along the shores of Lake Silvaplana, he stopped before a mighty pyramidal block of stone, where he had the ‘abysmal thought’ of eternal return (or eternal recurrence).

In The Gay Science (1882), he adapted this flash of inspiration into one of philosophy’s greatest personal challenges. In Aphorism 341, he asks how you would feel if a demon crept into your loneliest loneliness and informed you that you would have to live your life exactly as it is, has been, and will be, over and over again. ‘Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: “You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!”’

For Nietzsche, how we respond to the demon is the acid test of life-affirmation. 

In Ecce Homo (1888), he says, ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.’

Whereas the Stoics asked us to accept our fate, Nietzsche challenged us to love it.

For it is not enough merely to endure. Instead, we must embrace every joy and every sorrow so completely as to be willing to relive them for evermore.

Even Nietzsche himself struggled to meet the standard he had set himself: ‘I confess that the deepest objection to the Eternal Recurrence… is always my mother and my sister.’ After Nietzsche’s mental collapse, his sister Elisabeth deleted the remark from Ecce Homo.

Sisyphus

Albert Camus, who kept a photograph of Nietzsche in his office, took the idea one step further.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, he compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for daring to defy the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. 

Yet Camus reaches one of the most startling conclusions in all philosophy: 

‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, and embracing it, he at the same time transcends it.

Or, in those wonderful words of Virgil,

Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.

The only hope for the doomed is no hope at all.

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This essay draws on themes explored at greater length in Stoic Stories, my overview of Stoic philosophy, and The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

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Inauthenticity involves pretending to be something other than one is and so, by implication, casting off the freedom to create, express, and fulfil one’s own self. Inauthenticity is often reinforced by sociocultural forces such as peer pressure and advertising, and is motivated by the subconscious desires to fit in, avoid criticism, and minimise or put off the existential anxiety associated with choice and responsibility. Examples include the teenager who acts ‘cool’, the person who takes an interest in something because others do, and the person who gets married because he has arrived at the ripe old age of 30, 35, or 40 years old.

The 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre calls such inauthenticity mauvaise foie, ‘bad faith’. His paradigmatic example of bad faith is that of a waiter who does his utmost to conform to the archetype of the waiter, that is, to everything that a waiter should or is expected to be. For Sartre, the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice’ and failing to entertain or even recognise the multitude of other choices that are open to him, the waiter places himself at the mercy of his external circumstances. In this important respect, he is more akin to an object – ‘a waiter’ – than to a conscious human being who is able to transcend his existence to give shape to his essence. As Freud himself commented in his book, Civilization and its Discontents, ‘Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’

The concept of authenticity does not begin with Sartre or Freud, and stretches at least as far back as Plato. In the Greater Alcibiades, Socrates asks a young and foolish Alcibiades how one is to go about gaining self-knowledge. Socrates maintains that, if one were to say to the eye, ‘See yourself,’ the eye should look into a mirror to see itself. Since the pupil of the eye is just like a mirror, the eye could see itself by looking into an eye. Similarly, the soul can see itself by looking into the soul, and particularly into that part of the soul which has most to do with wisdom and which is therefore most akin to the divine. Self-knowledge, Socrates concludes, is, in fact, no other than wisdom; unless Alcibiades finds wisdom, he will never be able to know his own good and evil, nor that of others, nor the affairs of states. If Alcibiades were to become a statesman – as indeed he intends – without first having found wisdom, he would fall into error and be miserable, and make everybody else miserable too. What is more, he who is not wise cannot be happy, and it is better for such a person to be commanded by a superior in wisdom; since that which is better is also more becoming, slavery is more becoming to such a person. Socrates’ conclusions may seem abhorrent to modern sensitivities, but it does stand to reason that the person who unconsciously defines himself according to the likes and expectations of others and, by extension, of society also condemns himself to by far the most dishonourable kind of slavery, the slavery of the mind.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
…
– William Blake, London

As noted by the 20th century psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, the authentic person does not necessarily need to resemble some kind of freak outsider. If a person engages in a frank and thorough appraisal of the universal and personal implications of the prevailing social norms and then decides to adopt some or most of them en toute connaissance de cause, then he cannot be taxed with inauthenticity. Conversely, it should not be assumed that every eccentric is an authentic. Genuine authenticity lies in the method and not in the madness.

Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith

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As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become. – Sartre

The 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called it ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), the habit that people have of deceiving themselves into thinking that they do not have the freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences of making a choice. By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice’ and failing to recognise the multitude of other choices that are available to him, a person places himself at the mercy of the circumstances in which he happens to find himself. Thus, the person is more akin to an object than to a conscious human being, or, in Sartrean terminology, more akin to a ‘being–in–itself’ than to a ‘being–for–itself’. People may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices by pursuing pragmatic concerns and adopting social roles and value systems that are alien to their nature as conscious human beings. However, to do so is in itself to make a choice, and thereby to acknowledge their freedom as conscious human beings.

Examples

One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter should be. For Sartre, the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. However, in order to play-act at being a waiter, the waiter must at some level be aware that he is not in fact a waiter, but a conscious human being who is deceiving himself that he is a waiter. Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date. The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances. Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.

Implications

For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, social roles, and value systems. In pursuing such and such pragmatic concerns or adopting such and such social roles and such and such value systems, a person may pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices, but to do so is in itself to make a choice, namely, the choice of pretending to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices. Man, Sartre concludes, is condemned to be free.

Inauthenticity