INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY FIELD

This paper explores a simple question: can authenticity survive without metaphysical foundations? It does so by reading Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism published 1946 and Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus published in 1942 closely against one another. Both thinkers start in the same place, really. God is gone. Human nature is not fixed. There are no objective moral values handed down from anywhere. But here is where things split apart. Sartre insists that authenticity lives in freedom: radical, vertiginous freedom. To live authentically means recognizing that your choices don't just shape you, they propose an image of humanity itself. This is where his doctrine of responsibility emerges: collective, crushing, inescapable. Camus takes a different path entirely. He argues for something he calls lucidity, and paired with it a kind of perpetual revolt. Not against society exactly, but against the temptation to escape the absurd through either suicide or false hope. His authentic agent doesn't create values; they sustain a refusal to accept comforting lies about meaning. These two models are coherent on their own terms, yet they diverge at every crucial point: in what they understand consciousness to be, in how an agent relates to freedom and value and perhaps most strikingly, in what authenticity actually feels like. Where Sartre's person is dignified and consistent, Camus imagines his absurd hero as happy, even content, rolling the boulder without illusion. This paper argues that authenticity without transcendence is possible, but its shape depends entirely on whether you begin from Sartre's ontology or Camus's lived experience of meaninglessness.