One of the hallmarks of existentialism is its particular emphasis on the concept of ‘anguish', understood as the feeling we experience when we grasp our radical responsibility in defining who we are – individually and as a species. If human beings have no predetermined essence written in the heavens, as existentialists argue, and we can be pinned down only as something based on our actual existence, then our actions – for which we are responsible – are the only measures of what it is to be a human being.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre summarised this idea with the statement that for humans ‘existence precedes essence'. But the corollary of his existentialist take on our being is the tormenting realisation that we are nothing outside of what we make of ourselves; or, in other words, that we are absolutely responsible for our existence. In fact, it is not only our individuality that we are responsible for when we choose; in his lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) at least, Sartre claims that we also commit the rest of humanity when engaging in a particular way of being. He argues that, since every single one of our actions creates an image of humanity as we think we ought to be, we should then always ask ourselves: ‘What would happen if everyone did as one is doing?' When we truly confront this question, we become aware of the extent of our responsibility towards humankind, leading to an unavoidable feeling of anguish – a kind of dizziness prompted by the realisation of our enormous duty.
One of the problems with Sartre's argument is that, in practice, we rarely experience the harrowing anguish he describes as we go about life. Yes, there are special occasions when we have to make difficult choices and we are confronted with the weight of our responsibility as agents, but these are exceptional cases at best. To say that we should act as if every single action we perform was a statement that defines us as individuals and humanity at large simply goes against our regular experience: as important as we might take ourselves to be, most of our actions seem inconsequential in shaping who we are individually or collectively.
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