Existentialism and Community

Quick Answer

The popular image of existentialism is a solitary figure staring into the void, choosing in isolation, indifferent to other people. The image is a caricature. From the beginning, the existentialist tradition has been deeply concerned with the other, with encounter, and with community — though it approaches them in its own demanding way. The question it asks is not whether we should be with others but how: how can two freedoms meet without one absorbing the other? How can a community be genuine rather than a herd? How can solitude and solidarity be reconciled?

Sartre is the thinker most responsible for the stereotype. His famous claim that "hell is other people" and his analysis of "the look" (le regard) — the way the other's gaze fixes and objectifies me — seem to make intersubjectivity a curse. But the full picture is different: for Sartre, the other is also the one through whom I become aware of myself; my shame, my pride, my self-image all arise through the other. The problem is not that we are with others but that we so often meet them in bad faith, as things rather than freedoms. The task of existentialism is not to escape the other but to meet the other authentically.

Other existentialists drew the community-oriented conclusions explicitly. Beauvoir made the freedom of others the condition of my own freedom. Arendt made plurality — the fact that human beings, and not one human being, inhabit the earth — the ground of political life. Karl Jaspers argued that communication (Kommunikation) is the ultimate philosophical category: existence becomes itself only in communication with other existence. And Martin Buber, in I and Thou, built an entire philosophy on the meeting between persons. Existentialism, properly understood, is not a philosophy of lonely freedom; it is a philosophy of freedom with others.

Definition

Community, in the existentialist sense, is not the same as society, association, or mere co-existence. It is the mode of being-with-others in which each person is affirmed as a free, finite, irreplaceable individual, and in which the meeting between persons is recognized as constitutive of who each one is. Three features distinguish existential community from its counterfeits. First, it is voluntary: it is chosen, maintained, and owned by its members, rather than inherited or enforced. Second, it is mutual: the members are subjects for one another, not objects; each affirms the other's freedom rather than using the other. Third, it is finite: existential community does not promise to dissolve individuality into a collective womb; it preserves the tension between solidarity and solitude.

The key philosophical distinction is between being-with (Mitsein) and being-among (Miteinandersein as mere juxtaposition). Heidegger argued that being-with-others is a fundamental structure of Dasein: we are never simply alone in a world of objects; the world is always already shared. But being-with can degenerate into das Man — the anonymous "they" in which everyone is substitutable and no one is a person. Authentic community is the recovery of being-with as genuine encounter: being with others as others, not as functions, types, or instruments. This is why existentialism distinguishes community from conformity: the crowd is the counterfeit of community, the place where individuality is dissolved; community is the place where individuality is confirmed.

Martin Buber's distinction between I-Thou and I-It sharpens the definition. In the I-It relation, I encounter the other as an object — to be used, known, categorized, or managed. In the I-Thou relation, I meet the other as a whole person, in presence, without reduction. Buber insisted that a human life is constituted by the mode of its relation: "All real living is meeting." Community, on this account, is not a collection of individuals who happen to cooperate; it is the network of genuine I-Thou meetings, each of which is irreplaceable. The definition of existential community is therefore relational through and through: we are who we are in and through the meetings that constitute our lives.

Historical Context

The existentialist concern with community grew out of a double dissatisfaction in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the tradition reacted against the abstract universalism of Enlightenment and Idealist philosophy, which seemed to treat human beings as interchangeable instances of a general reason. Kierkegaard attacked the "crowd" precisely because it made the individual a member of an abstract collective, and he insisted that existence is always individual — "the crowd is untruth." On the other hand, the tradition reacted against the growing atomization of modern society: industrial capitalism, urbanization, and the market were dissolving traditional communities into aggregates of self-interested individuals. The existentialist answer to both failures was the same: the individual and the community are not opposites but correlatives — the individual can be an individual only in genuine relation, and the community can be genuine only when it affirms individuals.

The twentieth century deepened both concerns. The experience of totalitarianism — in which the individual is wholly absorbed into the mass and the mass into the leader — gave the crowd a terrifying new face. Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and her later works analyzed how the isolation of individuals makes them available for total domination: the regime requires atomized, disconnected human beings who can be organized from above. Against this, she set the ideal of plurality and the public realm: a space in which distinct human beings appear to one another, speak and act together, and thereby constitute a common world. Existentialism's defense of the individual turned out to be at the same time a defense of genuine community against the false community of the mass.

The encounter with the other also became a philosophical theme in its own right. Husserl's phenomenology had already raised the problem of intersubjectivity — how do I experience others as other subjects? — and his student Edith Stein developed a phenomenology of empathy. Buber's I and Thou (1923) gave the problem its most influential existential formulation, and Gabriel Marcel developed a philosophy of "presence," "fidelity," and "availability" (disponibilité) in which the meeting with the other is the paradigm of all genuine experience. By the middle of the century, the existentialist tradition had produced what amounts to a philosophy of the encounter: the self is not first alone and then reluctantly social; the self is constituted in and through its relations with others, and the quality of those relations is the quality of one's existence.

Philosophical Perspectives

Beauvoir's contribution is the most ethically developed. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), she argued that the fundamental ambiguity of the human condition — we are both subjects and objects, both free and situated — finds its resolution only in the recognition of the other. "To will oneself free," she wrote, "is also to will others free." The argument is not merely sentimental: freedom is exercised in a world, and the world includes other freedoms; a freedom that is bought at the price of another's unfreedom is a freedom that contradicts its own principle. This is why Beauvoir's existentialism is also a political philosophy: oppression is not a peripheral injustice but a structural contradiction of freedom, and the ethics of freedom demands the transformation of situations in which some are free at the expense of others. Her later work, including The Second Sex, applies this framework to the situation of women, showing that the "woman question" is at bottom an existential question about freedom and reciprocity.

Arendt's contribution is the most political. For Arendt, the human condition of plurality means that we are distinguished — each of us is unique and appears as a distinct being among others — and that this plurality is the condition of all political life. Action, the highest human activity, is the disclosure of who one is in speech and deed before others; it requires a public space in which people can appear to one another and in which new beginnings are possible. Community, in Arendt's sense, is not the household (the private realm of necessity) but the public realm (the realm of freedom, in which equals meet as equals). Her warning is directly existentialist: when the public realm collapses — when action is replaced by behavior, and citizens by consumers — human beings lose the space in which their freedom can appear, and the human condition itself is impoverished.

Buber and Marcel offer the most personal accounts. For Buber, the I-Thou meeting is not a means to community but its substance: every genuine meeting, whether with a person, a work, or God, is a Thou-encounter, and a life is authentic to the extent that it is composed of such meetings. For Marcel, the other is met in "presence": being available to the other (disponibilité) is the root of fidelity, and fidelity is the root of hope — the hope that sustains a broken world. Jaspers made communication the criterion of truth in philosophy: what cannot be communicated to another existence is not genuine existence. What unites these perspectives is a single thesis: the self is not a monad that chooses whether to open itself to others; the self is the opening itself, and community is not an addition to existence but its fulfillment.

Different Traditions Comparison

The existentialist account of community can be compared with other major traditions. Aristotelian and virtue-ethical views treat community as natural: human beings are political animals (zoon politikon), and the polis is the condition of human flourishing. The existentialist agrees that we are with others from the start, but resists the Aristotelian confidence that community has a natural form — the existentialist insists that how we are with others is a task and a choice, not a given. Where Aristotle finds the good life in the well-ordered polis, the existentialist finds it in the quality of the encounter: a genuine meeting between two persons can be worth more than a well-ordered but anonymous society.

Confucian and communicarian traditions make the priority of relationship explicit: the self is constituted by its roles — child, parent, friend, citizen — and the good life consists in the sincere performance of these roles. The existentialist agrees that the self is relational but draws the line at role: for the existentialist, I am not identical with my roles, and authenticity requires that I own my roles rather than be owned by them. The comparison is instructive: Confucianism worries about the self that imagines itself independent of relationships; existentialism worries about the self that is absorbed into its relationships without remainder. Both are defenses of genuine relatedness against its corruptions — the one against selfishness, the other against herd-like absorption.

Buddhist views of community are built on interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda) and compassion: since no self exists independently, all beings are mutually constituted, and the awakened life is one of universal compassion. The existentialist account is close in recognizing that the self is not a self-contained substance, but it retains the individual's freedom and responsibility as irreducible. Buddhism would see the existentialist emphasis on the individual's ownmost possibilities as a residue of the self-attachment it seeks to dissolve; the existentialist would see the Buddhist dissolution of the self as risking the disappearance of the very agent who must live the good life. The comparison illuminates a live question: how much self must remain for community to be communal rather than collective?

Modern Reflection

The question of existentialism and community has never been more relevant. Modern life is marked by a paradox: we are more connected than ever — through networks, platforms, and global markets — and more isolated than ever, in the sense that our connections are increasingly thin, instrumental, and interchangeable. The existentialist analysis predicts this exactly: connection without encounter is not community but its simulation. When we are linked to thousands of "friends" without meeting any of them as a Thou, we inhabit an I-It world in which even intimacy is objectified — performed for an audience, optimized for approval, consumed like content.

The existentialist response is not a retreat into the private self. It is the demand for genuine encounter: attention, presence, fidelity, and the willingness to be changed by the other. Marcel's disponibilité — availability — names the capacity that modern life most threatens: the capacity to be present to the other without reservation, to receive the other as a gift rather than a resource. Arendt's plurality reminds us that the public realm is not obsolete: politics, in her sense, is the space in which distinct human beings appear to one another and act together, and its decay — into administration, spectacle, and the management of needs — is a loss of the human condition, not a liberation from it.

The practical implication is a rethinking of community itself. Community, on the existentialist account, is neither the premodern village nor the digital network; it is the circle of meetings in which each person is affirmed as a free and finite individual — a friend, a colleague, a neighbor, a fellow citizen, a stranger met in presence. It is built by the quality of attention we give, the fidelity we keep, and the solidarity we extend to those whose freedom is threatened. The existentialist tradition, so often accused of solipsism, turns out to be one of the most demanding philosophies of community available: it refuses both the false community of the crowd and the false solitude of the atom, and it insists that genuine freedom is always freedom with others.

Related Thinkers

• Hannah Arendt — grounded political life in plurality and action, warning that the loss of the public realm impoverishes the human condition
• Simone de Beauvoir — argued that willing one's own freedom requires willing the freedom of others, making reciprocity the heart of existentialist ethics
• Karl Jaspers — made communication the fundamental category of philosophy: existence becomes itself only in dialogue with other existence
• Gabriel Marcel — developed a philosophy of presence, fidelity, and availability in which the meeting with the other is the paradigm of genuine life

Related Quotes

• "All real living is meeting." — Martin Buber
• "To will oneself free is also to will others free." — Simone de Beauvoir
• "The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves." — Hannah Arendt
• "The fundamental fact of human existence is man with man." — Martin Buber

Further Learning

To explore existentialism and community further, follow these connected resources in the ZHAIBIAN archive:

• I and Thou — Buber's classic account of the meeting between persons
• The Human Condition — Arendt's analysis of action, plurality, and the public realm
• What Is the Other? — the essential guide to the existentialist concept of the other
• What Is Existentialism? — the introduction to the tradition and its central themes
• Community — the wisdom entry on belonging and being with others
• Connection — the wisdom entry on genuine meeting in an age of simulation

Sources

• "Hannah Arendt." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/
• "Simone de Beauvoir." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
• "Existentialism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
• "Gabriel Marcel." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/