The Unchosen Condition: Existentialism & the Question of Birth
Existentialism offers powerful tools for confronting a meaningless world. But by focusing on the existing individual, it fails to ask the most fundamental question: is it ethical to impose existence in the first place?
Introduction
To be is to be “thrown into the world,” in the stark terminology of Martin Heidegger. We arrive without consent, emerging from non-existence into a state of being that is simultaneously miraculous and baffling. This primal condition is the starting point for existential philosophy, which grapples with the profound disorientation of a conscious mind seeking meaning in a silent, indifferent universe. The great existentialists of the 20th century, particularly Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, accepted this “absurd” predicament as the fundamental challenge of human life. Their philosophies are heroic attempts to build a foundation for meaning, freedom, and even joy upon the bedrock of cosmic meaninglessness.
Yet, a tension haunts this project. Existentialism, in its most popular forms, is a philosophy of endurance and rebellion *for the already living*. It provides a powerful framework for confronting our unchosen existence but largely overlooks the ethics of imposing that existence on others. Camus’s absurd hero, Sisyphus, finds meaning in scorning the gods and his pointless task, but the philosophy does not question the morality of sentencing him to the hill in the first place. Sartre’s radical freedom is a condemnation to choose, but it is a condemnation that begins only after the sentence of birth has been carried out.
This essay argues that while Camus and Sartre offer indispensable tools for navigating an unjustified existence, their philosophies stop short of the most fundamental ethical question. By implicitly accepting birth as a neutral starting point, they fail to complete the existential inquiry. It is in the bleaker, more provocative work of philosophical pessimists like Arthur Schopenhauer and modern antinatalists like David Benatar, and most poignantly in the aphoristic despair of Emil Cioran, that this neglected question is confronted directly. Reading these traditions against each other reveals that a complete reckoning with existence requires not only asking, “How shall I live?” but also confronting the prior, more disturbing question: “Was it right to have been made to live at all?”
Core Argument
The core argument of this essay is that the classic existentialist response to absurdity is ethically incomplete because it fails to apply its own rigorous standard of lucidity to the act of procreation. The existentialist project, which begins with the shock of being “thrown” into existence, focuses almost exclusively on how the thrown individual can create value and meaning *post-facto*. This approach, while valuable, treats existence as a brute fact to be dealt with rather than an ethically fraught state to be imposed. The freedom and responsibility so central to Sartre’s thought are confined to the choices made *within* life, not the choice to *initiate* a life. Similarly, Camus’s “revolt” is a response to the absurdity one finds oneself in, a rebellion against an imposed condition, not a questioning of the act of imposition itself.
This oversight represents a failure to follow the thread of existential inquiry to its logical conclusion. If the universe is truly devoid of inherent meaning and purpose, and if suffering is a significant and unavoidable feature of conscious existence (premises widely accepted within this tradition), then the creation of a new conscious being who must confront this predicament is an act that demands profound ethical justification. The existentialist affirmation of life—the celebration of Sisyphus’s scornful happiness—functions as a magnificent coping mechanism, but it does not justify the initial act of harm. It praises the prisoner who learns to sing in his cell without questioning the justice of his sentence.
In contrast, the pessimistic and antinatalist traditions, as articulated by thinkers from Schopenhauer to Cioran to Benatar, argue that the harms of existence (pain, suffering, anxiety, death) are both certain and severe, while the pleasures are fleeting and cannot compensate for them. From this perspective, non-existence is ethically preferable because it entails the absence of all harms. By placing the act of birth at the center of ethical scrutiny, these philosophies expose the blind spot in mainstream existentialism. They suggest that the ultimate act of “bad faith”—the flight from uncomfortable truths—is not the refusal to create meaning in a meaningless world, but the refusal to question the morality of forcing another being into that world to begin with.
Historical Background
The intellectual soil for this debate was tilled by 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In his seminal work, *The World as Will and Representation*, Schopenhauer posited that the universe is driven by a blind, irrational, and insatiable force he called the Will. This Will is the inner nature of everything, a constant striving that can never be satisfied. Consequently, life is a perpetual oscillation between the pain of desire and the boredom of its brief fulfillment. For Schopenhauer, suffering is not an aberration but the very essence of existence. From this, he concluded that it would be better if the world did not exist and viewed the act of bringing a child into it as a cruel and irresponsible act, burdening them with the “debt of life.”
The “death of God,” proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche later in the century, shattered the last vestiges of externally imposed meaning and cosmic order for Western philosophy. This set the stage for the existentialists of the mid-20th century. In the rubble of two world wars and the collapse of traditional values, thinkers like Sartre and Camus faced the challenge of building a humanistic ethics from ground zero. Their project was to affirm human dignity and freedom not as gifts from God, but as products of our own creation in the face of an absurd universe. Sartre’s existentialism, outlined in *Being and Nothingness*, posits that “existence precedes essence,” meaning we are born as a blank slate (“existence”) and must define ourselves (“essence”) through our choices. Camus, in *The Myth of Sisyphus*, defines the absurd as the clash between humanity’s rational demand for meaning and the universe’s irrational silence. His solution is not suicide or blind faith, but a life of constant, conscious revolt.
Into this milieu entered Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher and essayist who exists as a fascinating bridge between Schopenhauerian pessimism and Sartrean existentialism. Having absorbed the existentialist atmosphere of post-war Paris, Cioran possessed a lucidity equal to Camus’s but drew a diametrically opposite conclusion. He agreed on the diagnosis—the absurdity, the meaninglessness, the lack of justification—but rejected the cure. For Cioran, the lucidity that reveals life’s absurdity does not lead to a heroic revolt but to a profound and inconsolable regret for having been born. His masterpiece, *The Trouble with Being Born*, is a sustained, aphoristic meditation on birth as a primal catastrophe. He stands as a direct refutation of the Camusian project, an insider to the existential predicament who finds the burden of consciousness too heavy a price for the freedom to create meaning.
Supporting Evidence
The case for existentialism’s ethical blind spot can be built by examining the core tenets of its key thinkers and contrasting them with the pessimistic critique.
**Albert Camus** provides the most vivid example in *The Myth of Sisyphus*. Sisyphus, condemned to endlessly push a boulder up a mountain only for it to roll back down, is Camus’s hero. The heroism lies not in the task, but in Sisyphus’s consciousness of its futility. By understanding his condition and scorning it, he rises above his fate. "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus famously concludes. But this happiness is purely reactive. It is a psychological victory within a state of objective defeat. The analysis celebrates the coping strategy but never critiques the punishment. An antinatalist reading would ask: is it ethical to create a being whose only path to a meaningful life is to find happiness in a pointless struggle imposed upon them? Camus focuses on the dignity of the condemned, but not the ethics of the condemner.
**Jean-Paul Sartre**’s framework in *Being and Nothingness* revolves around the concept of radical freedom and the anguish that accompanies it. We are "condemned to be free," meaning we are responsible for every choice we make to create our essence. Fleeing this responsibility is "bad faith." Yet, this entire system of radical freedom is predicated on the ultimate unfreedom: being born. We do not choose to enter the game where we are forced to choose. Furthermore, a key source of anguish in Sartre's philosophy is the presence of the Other. The Other’s "gaze" objectifies us, turning us from a free subject ("for-itself") into a determined object ("in-itself"). This inherent conflict and objectification are unavoidable consequences of social existence, a state no one consents to enter. The suffering caused by the Other is a built-in cost of admission to a world you were forced to populate.
**Emil Cioran** offers the most direct and potent evidence for the opposing view. His work is a sustained argument from the perspective of the unwillingly born. Cioran writes in *The Trouble with Being Born*, "Not to be born is undoubtedly the best formula for happiness." He inverts the entire existentialist project. Whereas for Sartre and Camus the problem is what to *do* with the fact of existence, for Cioran the problem *is* the fact of existence. He sees birth not as a starting line for freedom, but as an "accident," a "calamity," the source of all subsequent bondage and suffering. His philosophy is not a systematic argument like that of an analytic philosopher, but an expression of a lived, felt conclusion derived from the same existential lucidity Camus champions. He demonstrates that one can fully grasp the absurd and, instead of revolting, simply regret.
Finally, the arguments of contemporary antinatalist **David Benatar** provide a formal, logical structure to the intuitions of Schopenhauer and Cioran. In *Better Never to Have Been*, Benatar presents his "asymmetry of pleasure and pain." The argument runs: 1) The presence of pain is bad. 2) The presence of pleasure is good. 3) The absence of pain is good, even if no one experiences that good. 4) The absence of pleasure is not bad, unless there is someone for whom this absence is a deprivation. When we create a person, we guarantee they will experience suffering (bad) for the sake of potential pleasures (good). By not creating a person, we guarantee the absence of their suffering (good) while incurring no ethical loss, as the absence of their pleasure is not bad for the non-existent. This provides a rigorous ethical calculus that concludes procreation is always a net harm, formalizing the challenge that existentialism ignores.
Counterarguments
Naturally, the affirmation of life at the heart of existentialism and common-sense intuition provides strong counterarguments to the pessimistic and antinatalist position.
The most prominent counter is the **Promethean Affirmation of Created Value**. This viewpoint, central to Camus and Sartre, holds that the absence of inherent meaning is not a bug but a feature. It is the precondition for true human freedom. The value of life lies not in what is given, but in what we create: love, art, solidarity, knowledge, and the project of the self. To preemptively deny existence based on a calculation of potential suffering is to foreclose the possibility of these created goods, which may be judged by the individual to be worth the cost. Sisyphus’s happiness, from this perspective, is not a mere coping mechanism but the ultimate triumph of the human spirit—the creation of meaning *ex nihilo*. Procreation, then, can be seen as the act of granting another the opportunity for this noble struggle.
A second, related counterargument is the **Deprivation of Goods**. This argument posits that while a non-existent being cannot *feel* deprived, the act of withholding existence is nonetheless an act of denying them all the potential joys and beauties of life. From a more objective standpoint, a possible world containing a happy human is better than a possible world without one. While antinatalists focus on the guaranteed harms, this view focuses on the immense potential goods that are irretrievably lost. As philosopher Derek Parfit’s work on population ethics explores, these calculations are complex, but a common intuition remains: to deny someone the chance at a happy life seems like a significant loss, even if that "someone" is merely potential.
Finally, an existentialist could level the charge of **Bad Faith against the Pessimist**. From a Sartrean perspective, embracing a deterministic philosophy like Schopenhauer’s—where suffering is an inevitable outcome of a metaphysical Will—or adopting the rigid calculus of Benatar could be seen as a sophisticated form of bad faith. It is a way of fleeing the radical, terrifying freedom to create happiness and value *despite* suffering. By declaring the game unwinnable from the start, the pessimist absolves themselves of the arduous responsibility to play it well, to strive for joy, and to overcome obstacles. In this view, antinatalism is not the result of superior lucidity, but a refusal to shoulder the burden and the glory of the human condition.
Rebuttals
The pessimistic and antinatalist positions hold robust responses to these counterarguments.
In response to the **Promethean Affirmation**, the rebuttal is simple: the magnificent ability to create meaning does not retroactively justify the imposition of a condition where meaning must be created. Celebrating the solution while ignoring the non-consensual nature of the problem is a form of ethical gerrymandering. We can admire the ingenuity of a castaway who builds a shelter and finds a way to thrive on a deserted island, but this does not make the act of shipwrecking them a benevolent one. The "triumph" is entirely contingent on the "tragedy." The antinatalist argument is not that life has no value, but that this value cannot ethically justify the imposition of the severe harms required to achieve it, especially when the alternative (non-existence) involves no harm at all.
Against the **Deprivation of Goods** argument, Benatar’s asymmetry is the key rebuttal. The argument that a potential person is "deprived" of pleasure is a conceptual error. Deprivation requires a subject. A non-existent being has no interests, desires, or needs; they are not waiting in a void to be born. Therefore, the absence of pleasure for this non-entity is not a bad thing. However, the absence of the pain they would have experienced *is* a good thing. The antinatalist is not depriving anyone of anything; they are preventing a guaranteed harm (suffering) at the cost of a "good" (pleasure) that has no subject to value it. The ethical choice is to prevent certain harm rather than gamble on potential pleasure for a being that currently has no stake in the game.
Finally, the charge of **Bad Faith** can be turned back on the existentialist affirmer. The antinatalist could argue that the ultimate act of bad faith is to procreate without deeply and honestly confronting the suffering that will be inflicted. It is to flee from the most awesome responsibility of all: the decision to force consciousness, with its attendant burdens of anxiety, pain, and death, upon another. The pessimist or antinatalist is not fleeing freedom; they are applying the principle of responsibility to its absolute origin point. From this vantage point, the lucid and courageous act is not simply to affirm one’s own unchosen life, but to have the ethical foresight and compassion to refrain from imposing that same predicament on another. Questioning the game itself is a more radical confrontation with reality than merely devising a strategy to play it.
Conclusion
Existentialism, particularly in the hands of Camus and Sartre, offers a profound and necessary rebellion. It provides a blueprint for constructing a meaningful life on the desolate landscape of a universe without purpose. The image of a happy Sisyphus and the declaration that we are "condemned to be free" are powerful testaments to the resilience and creative capacity of the human spirit. They are philosophies for the living, and for that, they are indispensable.
However, this analysis reveals an ethical incompleteness at the heart of their project. By taking the existence of the subject for granted, classic existentialism becomes a brilliant *response* to a problem while avoiding any inquiry into the problem’s creation. It teaches us how to bear our thrownness but not whether it is ethical to do the throwing. The philosophies operate in media res, after the irreversible act of birth has already occurred.
It is the often-maligned tradition of philosophical pessimism and the modern arguments of antinatalism that complete the circle of inquiry. Thinkers like Schopenhauer, Cioran, and Benatar take the existentialist premise of a meaningless and often painful world to what they see as its logical and ethical conclusion. They shift the focus from the drama of living to the ethics of creating life. Cioran’s lament over the “trouble with being born” is not an abdication of existential lucidity but perhaps its most radical expression. It forces us to acknowledge that the most fundamental choice related to existence is not one any of us gets to make for ourselves, but one that is made for us.
A truly comprehensive existentialism, then, must be one that folds a procreative ethic into its framework. It must reckon with the fact that creating a new subject who is "condemned to be free" is itself a choice of monumental ethical weight. It must ask not only how Sisyphus can be happy, but whether we have the right to put another person before that boulder at all. The discomfort of this question does not diminish its importance; it underscores it.