What Does Knowing the Finitude of Our Existence Give Us?
Albert Camus wrote that a person begins at the limit. The classics of existential philosophy believed that humans reveal and understand themselves in boundary situations, at the edge of their being. But what exactly is this limit, and does it truly exist for humans? Let’s explore what existential consciousness is, how the finitude of our existence affects our self-perception, and why the anthropological limit becomes a condition for human existence and self-understanding.
The Steamboat Wheel Metaphor
Imagine a steamboat wheel. This device propels the steamboat through water. We can only see half of the working wheel; the other half is hidden underwater, but it’s just as essential. The wheel rotates, and each part alternates between being submerged and visible. For the steamboat to move and overcome the current, the wheel must keep turning. This image can be compared to human existence: a person exists in a way that reproduces their being. However, the analogy ends there, because human existence includes a unique condition—consciousness. Since it relates to being, let’s call it existential consciousness.
What Is Existential Consciousness?
The concept of existential consciousness doesn’t refer to a special type of consciousness alongside others, like scientific, political, artistic, religious, or mythological consciousness. Consciousness as a whole is not just awareness or knowledge of something (a psychological structure), but also points to an ontological characteristic of humans (an existential structure). In other words, existential consciousness is not “consciousness of,” but “consciousness as.” Unlike empirical experience, existential experience is the experience of one’s own being. All existentialist thinkers agreed on this: existence is a unique way of human being in the world, always eluding understanding through abstractions. Existence cannot be grasped by conceptual analysis; it can only be experienced. The focus is on what it means to be.
For humans, the main problem becomes the finitude of their existence and the question of life’s prospects. The idea of finitude brings a special sense of boundary to the existential situation, which a person must “endure.” German philosopher Karl Jaspers called this the “boundary situation,” while his French colleague Gabriel Marcel described it as “being in a situation,” which is inherent to human existence. Thus, the boundary of existence points to finitude, meaning that beyond mortality, a person can relate to something outside their everyday experience. This means a person cannot be self-contained, like animals or inanimate objects, but instead fills the insufficiency of their being. Therefore, humans go beyond their immediate situation and never fully coincide with themselves. This is what distinguishes a person from, say, the chair they sit on.
The Inner Gap and Freedom
The condition of human consciousness is an internal gap within consciousness itself. Consciousness is detached from the “here and now.” Existentialists called this gap “nothingness,” which isolates a person from what they are not. Thanks to “nothingness,” humans gain freedom. The result of this freedom is a lack or deficiency of being within human existence. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness, a person “makes himself exist as a project of himself beyond the present, toward what he is not yet.”
Sartre noted that human reality never fully coincides with its projections. Therefore, the goal of the existential project cannot be achieved, not only because humans are finite, but also because its realization involves objectifications that lead to an inauthentic way of being and distance a person from themselves. By creating order in their world, a person simultaneously overcomes it by orienting toward the other. A person can be neither self-sufficient—since constant lack deprives them of wholeness—nor become whole outside themselves, as that would take away their freedom. Freedom is the ability “not to coincide with oneself, but always to be at a distance from oneself” (Sartre).
I believe there is a way out of the dead ends of human freedom that Sartre described. The ontological meaning of freedom for humans is to overcome all forces that constrain them, except one—the power over oneself, which becomes the object of their care. This is freedom not from coercion and control, but to think of possibilities beyond all limitations. It’s not about following a choice, but about changing the conditions of choice.
Authenticity and Being Oneself
It’s a common belief that freedom means being oneself. According to this idea, to be free is to match some original, which the copy strives to emulate. These originals are the established norms and standards of human activity, set by society or formed spontaneously in the course of history. However, human authenticity is not about matching something, but about one’s own way of being according to one’s existential possibilities. Being oneself doesn’t mean becoming someone or matching something. It means stopping the attempt to be what one is not, that is, to stop being a faceless Other. This doesn’t mean a person closes themselves off, but rather that they don’t disappear into others as mere possibilities.
The Limits of Existential Consciousness
Before being anything (desiring, knowing, acting), a person always already exists. By the way they exist, a person is a project of themselves. Remember the steamboat wheel with its hidden part? A person is a projective circle of being and understanding. By existing, a person understands themselves. By understanding themselves, a person exists. Self-understanding and self-creation are parts of this circle. Being and understanding mutually condition each other. Therefore, a person is what they understand themselves to be.
However, not all parts of this circle are above the surface at the same time. Psychoanalysis divided the human psyche into two parts—the unconscious and the conscious. Cognitive psychology also identifies unconscious processes in the psyche that guide decision-making. Existential philosophy seeks to find in the ontological structure of humans the foundations that participate in self-understanding. For example, Martin Heidegger called the structure that reliably connects a person to the world and enables understanding “being-in-the-world.”
We can conditionally distinguish between the reflexive and pre-reflexive levels of the human projective circle. A person understands themselves even at the pre-reflexive level of consciousness, but only becomes consciously aware of their life at the reflexive level. Thus, a person has both an unconscious and a conscious project of their existence. The first serves as the infrastructure for the second. The pre-reflexive level forms the basis of human activity; the reflexive level enables projective activity. Together, they complete our circle. The pre-reflexive level of consciousness forms identity, which at the reflexive level becomes the subject of preservation or transformation. As a result, human existence is filled with new qualitative content.
Project and Self-Understanding
The project becomes the condition for human self-understanding. A person does not know themselves, but their preliminary project as themselves. Here, the search for the “essence” of a person ends, and a new understanding of the human as a process emerges. From the point of identity with oneself, a person cannot understand their existence, since there is no process dynamic in identity. In other words, only by changing can one understand oneself.
Thus, by changing as a process, a person is not set once and for all by any program. A person understands and transforms themselves in the project (as we now know, on two levels). To have a reference point for projecting, a person needs a limit. Relative to the limit, a person self-determines. At the same time, the limit is the boundary of experience, which a person can change through self-overcoming.
In the first case, a person finds a form of stable existence over time (self-identification). Let’s call this constancy of form. In the second case, a person opens themselves to possible life changes. Let’s call this constancy of form-creation. Therefore, the anthropological limit includes both a universal constant and a universal variable in human existence. The boundaries of possible experience include the condition for overcoming them (often in crisis), without canceling the constancy of the limit itself. Human self-determination operates in the perspective of identity. On the other hand, self-overcoming unfolds in the perspective of “otherness.” Both participate in ensuring that human life maintains constancy amid change.
Subject and Personality
Applied to human existence, this understanding of the limit reveals two important social categories: subject and personality. The subject is a characteristic of identity and stability in human life. The subject is someone who can act and interact with others on their own behalf. This characteristic supports social relationships. In contrast, personality is a characteristic of otherness. Personality is realized to the extent that a person is ready for change, that is, ready to break out of the automatism of everyday experience.
Thus, the subject is someone who can be themselves, maintaining the identity of their life. Personality, on the other hand, is the ability to be different and overcome one’s accidental limitations. To establish and maintain relationships with a person, a subject is needed. For a person to solve life’s problems in unpredictable situations, personality is necessary.
Are There Limits to Human Existence?
Returning to our question: are there limits to human existence? By the way they exist, humans set limits in order to overcome them throughout life, both as individuals and as historical communities. By setting boundaries, a person changes them and thereby changes the meaning of their existence. The limit becomes a condition for human being and understanding.