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Yes and no. Depending on what you mean by truly human.
If we take as a basis some ideals in the spirit of ” a person should be free, responsible, boldly face the absurd, etc.”, then existentialism (especially in the spirit of Camus and Sartre) is human. They believe in a person (that he can become different from yesterday), but at the same time they demand a lot from him.
If we understand that a person is a real being, with a lot of limitations and internal difficulties, then existentialism is rather cruel and deaf to the truly human. For example, to be human means to make mistakes, and not to force yourself with ideals (invented by Sartre, who himself did not follow his ideal). What is the meaning of all these “must” and” must ” under the sauce of beautiful words? – Feelings of guilt and imperfection that do not make a person better. Alas!
We can assume that existentialism is rather a version of humanism that suffers from two serious problems::
1) Individualism, because within the framework of existentialism (and any kind, religious or secular), no collective morality is possible (it is considered a phantom, external violence against the individual), and there are only individual values of a person and his individual choice. Thus, human solidarity is extremely difficult, any solidarity with those who suffer can be declared hypocrisy (you don't suffer yourself, so why do you co-suffer, will it really be easier for another person if you feel worse in his presence out of hypocrisy), any opportunity to co-rejoice in turn is associated only with personal achievements (“if you share joy with others without feeling joy yourself, then why?”). In fact, as Ivan K. correctly noted here, existentialism requires “moral heroism” from a person in the conditions of “radical loneliness in the face of the world”. In this sense, there is no humanism as love for a person here, one side of a person is deified – the intellectual and volitional one.
2) Anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism manifests itself in the fact that all nature seems to be a soulless, hostile machine to man, although beautiful. From this machine, death falls on a person, which destroys him. If this is religious anthropocentrism, then the Machine-Nature is opposed by a good God (then religious dualism arises, in which Nature appears as something fallen, epistemologically and morally inferior, and God as a higher, good principle). If this is atheistic anthropocentrism, then the features of the” evil Nature ” are deified, it becomes something similar to fate, fate. In any case, this is also unlike the humanists of the past (XVIII-XIX centuries), who were more likely to talk about solidarity with nature or about preserving and transforming nature.
In general, existentialism is a sharp reaction to the social pessimism of the twentieth century, to the idea that any collective ideologies (liberalism, Nazism, communism) or even any orthodox religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) did not bring anything good to a person, he also remained alone and “abandoned” in our world. The forerunner of existentialism in general is on the one hand the Russian religious and symbolic literature of the XIX century (F. M. Dostoevsky, L. N. Tolstoy), and on the other hand – Nietzscheanism. And Nietzscheanism is essentially a denial of humanism.