Existence Precedes Essence
Being and Nothingness · Radical Freedom · Bad Faith · The Look · Engagement
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905–1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and political activist — the towering figure of twentieth-century existentialism. Born in Paris, raised by his grandfather (the polymath Charles Schweitzer, uncle of Albert Schweitzer), Sartre studied at the École Normale Supérieure where he met Simone de Beauvoir in 1929 — beginning one of intellectual history's most consequential partnerships.
After studying Husserl's phenomenology in Berlin (1933–34), Sartre returned to France, served in WWII, was captured and imprisoned, then joined the Resistance. After liberation he founded Les Temps Modernes, became the world's most famous public intellectual, and in 1964 refused the Nobel Prize in Literature — the only laureate to voluntarily decline.
Being and Nothingness (1943) · Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) · Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) · Nausea (1938) · No Exit (1944) · What Is Literature? (1948) · The Words (1964) · The Imaginary (1940)
There is no fixed human nature. Consciousness is a nothingness that perpetually transcends what is given. We are "condemned to be free" — and fully responsible for what we make of ourselves.
Sartre's 1943 masterwork — subtitled An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology — establishes a fundamental distinction between two modes of being. All of Sartre's philosophy flows from this ontological cleavage.
"Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself."
— J.-P. Sartre, Being and NothingnessThe fundamental principle of existentialism. For a paper-knife, essence (design, purpose) precedes existence — someone conceived it before making it. But for human beings, there is no designer, no blueprint, no human nature fixed in advance. We exist first, and only afterward do we define ourselves through our choices.
From Plato through the Enlightenment, philosophy held that there is a fixed human nature — an essence that defines what it means to be human before any particular human exists. God conceived man as an artisan conceives a tool.
If God does not exist, there is no concept of "man" in a divine mind. Man first exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards. Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.
There is no human nature to appeal to, no excuses, no determinism. Man is responsible for what he is. Not only does he choose himself, but in choosing himself he chooses all men — every act creates an image of man as he ought to be.
"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism."
— J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism Is a HumanismFor Sartre, freedom is not a property we possess — it is what we are. The for-itself is its freedom. We are "condemned to be free": we did not choose to be free, but having been thrown into existence, we cannot escape the necessity of choosing. Even refusing to choose is itself a choice.
Anguish (angoisse) is the affect that accompanies the recognition of this freedom. It is not fear of an external object but dread before oneself — before the abyss of one's own possibilities. Sartre's famous example: the person on the cliff-edge experiences vertigo not from the fear of falling, but from the awareness that nothing prevents them from throwing themselves off.
Fear is directed at an external threat — the rock that might fall. Anguish is directed at oneself — the recognition that I am not determined by anything to step back from the edge. My future self is separated from my present self by nothingness.
Freedom is not a gift but a burden. We bear the full weight of the world on our shoulders with no excuses. The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic. There are no "cowardly temperaments" — only cowardly choices.
"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
— J.-P. Sartre, Being and NothingnessMost people flee anguish through bad faith — a form of self-deception in which consciousness lies to itself about its own freedom. Bad faith is not simple lying (which requires two persons) but a paradoxical structure in which the deceiver and the deceived are one.
A waiter in a café performs his role with exaggerated precision — his gestures too eager, too mechanical, too "waiter-like." He plays at being a waiter as if the role were his fixed essence. But he is not a waiter the way an inkwell is an inkwell. He uses the role to deny his transcendence — to pretend he is a thing with a defined nature.
A woman on a first date refuses to acknowledge the sexual implications of her companion's words and gestures. When he takes her hand, she leaves it there — as if the hand were a mere object, not hers. She disarms the situation by reducing herself to pure facticity, denying her freedom to interpret, respond, or withdraw.
Sartre's account of being-for-others (l'être-pour-autrui) centres on the Look. The Other does not first appear as a body I perceive — the Other appears as a gaze that perceives me. Under the Other's Look, I am suddenly revealed to myself as an object — I have an "outside," a nature, a being that escapes my freedom.
The primordial experience of the Other is shame. I am peeping through a keyhole, absorbed in my act. Then I hear footsteps — I am seen. Suddenly I am a voyeur. The Look freezes me into a thing. My possibilities are stolen; my transcendence hemorrhages toward the Other.
Shame is not merely an emotion — it is an ontological event. Through shame, I recognise that I have a being-for-others that I cannot control. I am an object in a world that is not my own. The Other's freedom limits mine.
The famous line from No Exit (1944). Three characters trapped in a room realise there is no torturer — they are each other's torture. The Look of the Other is inescapable. Not misanthropy, but an ontological claim: conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.
"The Other's look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it."
— J.-P. Sartre, Being and NothingnessSartre asks: where does negation come from? Not from being itself, which is pure positivity. Nothingness enters the world through human consciousness — the for-itself is the being by which nothingness comes into being. Consciousness is a nihilation (néantisation): a perpetual withdrawal from what is.
Sartre's celebrated example: I enter a café expecting to find my friend Pierre. I scan the room — Pierre is not there. But this "not being there" is not a mere logical proposition. The entire café organises itself around Pierre's absence; the other faces recede as "not-Pierre." I intuit nothingness. This nihilation is the work of consciousness.
Consciousness can always step back from any given situation and negate it. I can say "no" to my past, my emotions, my social role. This is the ontological root of freedom: the for-itself is never identical with itself, never glued to its states. Between motive and act there is always a gap — a nothingness — that no determinism can bridge.
Sartrean freedom is absolute — not freedom within limits, but the very structure of consciousness. Freedom is not one property among others; it is the being of the for-itself. We are "not free to cease being free." No situation, however oppressive, determines what meaning we give it.
But freedom is not exercised in a vacuum. It always operates within a situation — the intersection of facticity (what is given: body, past, position) and transcendence (what I project beyond it). The slave in chains is free in that he can choose to revolt, to endure, to die — but his freedom is exercised against the chains, not in their absence.
"There is no determinism — man is free, man is freedom." I cannot blame heredity, environment, upbringing, or society. I am my choices. Even my emotions are chosen: to be angry is to choose anger as a way of being-in-the-world.
Facticity: I am born in this body, this era, this class — I did not choose these. Transcendence: I am always beyond my facticity — I choose what it means. The situation is neither pure facticity nor pure freedom but the indissoluble unity of both.
Each person has a fundamental "original project" — a pre-reflective choice of being that organises all their particular choices. Existential psychoanalysis aims to uncover this project, not in the unconscious, but in the pattern of lived choices.
In October 1945, Sartre delivered a public lecture — later published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme — defending existentialism against its critics: Communists who called it bourgeois quietism, and Christians who called it nihilistic despair. Sartre insisted that existentialism is, on the contrary, a philosophy of action, commitment, and responsibility.
In choosing for myself, I choose for all humanity. Every act is a statement: "this is how a human being should act." If I choose to marry, I affirm marriage. If I join a union, I affirm solidarity. We are legislators of the human image.
God does not exist, and we must draw out the consequences. There is no a priori Good, no eternal moral law inscribed in heaven. We are alone, without excuses. The student who asks Sartre whether to join the Resistance or stay with his mother receives no answer — he must choose, and in choosing, invent his values.
Existentialism demands engagement — commitment to concrete political and social action. The intellectual cannot retreat into contemplation. "To not choose is still to choose." Quietism is impossible; we are our acts, nothing more.
"We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free."
— J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism Is a HumanismIn the late 1950s, Sartre attempted the most ambitious philosophical project of his career: reconciling existential freedom with Marxist historical materialism. The Critique (1960) asks: how do individual free acts produce collective structures — and how do those structures constrain freedom in return?
A series is a collection of isolated individuals united only by an external object — people waiting for a bus, market agents responding to prices. Each acts alone; the collective is inert, its outcomes unintended. The practico-inert is the domain of matter worked by human praxis that now constrains it: institutions, tools, scarcity turned into counter-finality.
When a series awakens — as in the storming of the Bastille — it becomes a fused group (groupe en fusion). Each person is both sovereign and united. Freedom is exercised collectively. But the group inevitably re-ossifies: through the pledge (the oath of fraternity-terror), then the institution, then back into seriality.
In What Is Literature? (1948), Sartre argued that prose is fundamentally an act of disclosure — the writer reveals the world to the reader, and in doing so, makes an appeal to the reader's freedom. To write is to demand that the reader freely re-create the world the writer has disclosed. Literature is therefore intrinsically a pact between two freedoms.
This entails engaged writing (littérature engagée). The writer who pretends to neutrality is in bad faith. Every sentence takes a stand on the world. The writer must write for their time, addressing the concrete injustices and struggles of their era. Art for art's sake is a bourgeois mystification.
In The Imaginary (1940), Sartre showed that the imagination is the consciousness of an object as absent — a nihilation of the real. To imagine is to negate the given world and posit what is not. Imagination is thus a fundamental expression of human freedom.
Sartre distinguished sharply: prose uses language as a transparent tool for disclosure — it is committed. Poetry treats words as things, not signs — it cannot be "engaged" in the same way. This generated fierce debate with poets like Francis Ponge and surrealists.
"The writer is situated in his time; every word has consequences. Every silence, too."
— J.-P. Sartre, What Is Literature?Sartre drew heavily on Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), but transformed its concepts in ways Heidegger himself repudiated. Heidegger denied being an "existentialist" and accused Sartre of remaining trapped in the Cartesian subject-object framework he sought to overcome.
Dasein ("being-there") is not a consciousness opposed to the world but a being always already in the world. Authenticity means resoluteness in the face of death — owning one's finitude, answering the call of conscience, taking over one's thrown possibilities. The question is the meaning of Being as such, not the freedom of a subject.
The pour-soi is a consciousness that nihilates — a subject that constitutes its world through projects. Authenticity means good faith — acknowledging both freedom and facticity without fleeing into bad faith. The question is not Being but human freedom. Sartre retains the Cartesian cogito as his starting point.
Heidegger's 1933 rectoral address and NSDAP membership became a permanent stain. Sartre, by contrast, was a lifelong man of the Left — Resistance fighter, anti-colonialist, fellow traveller with Communism, supporter of the Algerian FLN and May 1968. Their politics could not have been more different.
In Letter on Humanism (1947), Heidegger rejected Sartre's formula "existence precedes essence" — arguing that it still thinks Being in terms of entia (beings), not from the vantage of Being itself. Sartre's humanism, Heidegger claimed, remains metaphysical — it elevates man rather than thinking the "truth of Being."
Sartre and Albert Camus were the twin poles of postwar French thought — close friends, then bitter enemies. Their break in 1952 was the most famous intellectual rupture of the century, fought out in the pages of Les Temps Modernes.
The ostensible cause was Camus's The Rebel (1951), which Sartre's journal savaged. But the deeper issue was political and philosophical: could revolutionary violence be justified? Camus said no — the rebel must refuse murder. Sartre said Camus's moral purity was the luxury of a bourgeois conscience, blind to the necessities of history.
For Camus, the Absurd — the gap between human longing for meaning and the world's indifference — is the starting point. One must revolt against it without hoping to overcome it. For Sartre, there is no fixed "absurd": consciousness creates meaning through free commitment. The absurd is a stage to pass through, not a permanent condition.
Sartre sided with historical violence and communist revolution as potentially justified. Camus insisted on moral limits. Sartre wrote: "You have become a former rebel." Camus replied: "I am beginning to be a little tired of seeing myself... receive endless lessons in effectiveness from critics who have never done anything." They never reconciled. Camus died in 1960.
Sartre's influence extends far beyond academic philosophy — into literature, psychotherapy, political theory, feminism, and postcolonial thought. He remains the paradigmatic figure of the engaged intellectual.
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) applied Sartrean categories — transcendence, immanence, the Other, bad faith — to the condition of women. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" is an existentialist thesis. Beauvoir also corrected Sartre: she showed that oppression can genuinely limit (not merely situate) freedom.
Frantz Fanon drew on Sartre's dialectic of the Look and being-for-others to theorise the colonial gaze and racial objectification. Sartre wrote the preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), endorsing anti-colonial violence. This influenced liberation movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
R.D. Laing applied Sartre's concepts to psychiatry. Irvin Yalom built existential psychotherapy on Sartrean themes: freedom, responsibility, isolation, death. "Existential psychoanalysis" — Sartre's own term — aims to uncover the fundamental project underlying a person's choices.
Anti-colonial struggles and Third World liberation · May 1968 and the New Left · Literary theory (commitment and the death of the author) · Continental philosophy (Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida all responded to Sartre) · Theatre of the absurd · Existential counselling and coaching
Freedom is too absolute — ignores structural oppression (Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty) · Cartesian starting point retains subject-object dualism (Heidegger) · Political misjudgements: apologetics for Soviet violence, uncritical Maoism · No adequate ethics (the promised ethics was never completed) · Lévi-Strauss and structuralism challenged the primacy of the subject
"Freedom is what we do with what is done to us."
— Jean-Paul Sartre1905 – 1980 · Paris · Engagement · Freedom
"Existence precedes essence."