Existence Precedes Essence

Consider a paper knife. Before any particular knife exists, there is a design: a specification of what it is for and how it must be shaped. Its essence precedes its existence. Now suppose there is no designer of human beings. Then nothing specifies in advance what we are for, and the order reverses. We exist first, and become what we are afterwards, through what we do.

That is the whole of Sartre's slogan, and everything else follows from it. If there is no human nature, then there is no such thing as being a certain kind of person independently of acting like one. There are only the choices, and the person is their accumulated result.

The immediate consequence is that a very common form of speech turns out to be false. That is just how I am. I had no choice. I am not the sort of person who does that. Each of these describes a history of choices as though it were a fixed property, and Sartre calls the manoeuvre bad faith.

His illustration is a waiter in a café whose movements are slightly too precise, whose attentiveness is a shade too eager: a man playing at being a waiter rather than being one. What he is escaping through the performance is that he is free at every moment to stop, and that a thing with a fixed essence has no choices to answer for. The escape is unstable, because you have to know the truth in order to keep hiding it from yourself. That is why bad faith takes constant maintenance and why it never quite works.

Sartre does not present this freedom as good news. Man is condemned to be free, he writes, and both words matter. It is a condition nobody consented to and nobody can resign from. Even refusing to choose is a choice, made with the time it consumes. What accompanies it is anguish, not fear of the world but vertigo at having nothing and nobody to hand the decision to.

He tests this with a case from the Occupation. A student comes to him torn between joining the Free French and staying to care for his mother, who has nobody else. Kantian reasoning gives an answer. Utilitarian reasoning gives an answer. And that, Sartre says, is the trap: both answers are available, so choosing which framework to apply is itself a choice that no framework can make for you. There is no procedure to escape into.

Two things are worth correcting. Hell is other people is a line spoken by a damned character in a play about three people locked in a room forever. It refers to being fixed as an object by another's gaze, the experience Sartre calls the look, not to a general misanthropy. And existentialism is not permission to do as you please: radical freedom brings total responsibility, since in choosing you also propose an image of what a person should be.

The serious objection came from Simone de Beauvoir, who had read every page before anyone else did. Sartre's freedom is abstract and therefore equal. Hers is situated. A woman with no education, no money and no legal standing is not free in the same way as the man who owns her circumstances, even though both technically choose. Material conditions can shrink the live options to almost nothing. Keeping the freedom and adding the situation is what turns existentialism from a description of the human condition into an ethics with something to say about changing it, and that correction is hers, not his.