Jean-Paul Sartre
1905–1980, Paris
Existentialism
You are nothing but what you make of yourself, and there is no excuse available.
“Man is condemned to be free.”
The life
Sartre's father died when he was an infant, and he was raised largely by his grandfather. He entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir in 1929; they placed first and second in the agrégation and remained partners, non-exclusively, for fifty years.
He studied Husserl and Heidegger in Berlin in the mid-1930s, which gave him the phenomenological method he used in Being and Nothingness. He was captured in 1940 and spent nine months as a prisoner of war, then returned to occupied Paris, where he wrote and staged plays under German censorship, a period his critics have examined closely.
After the war he was the most famous intellectual in the world. He founded Les Temps modernes, moved steadily leftward, backed Algerian independence at real personal risk, and refused the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 on the grounds that a writer should not let himself be turned into an institution. Around fifty thousand people followed his funeral procession.
What shaped the ideas
Occupation and resistance made abstract questions about freedom immediate. Under conditions where collaboration and resistance were both available and both costly, the claim that people are defined by what they choose had an obvious and uncomfortable application.
Sartre took Heidegger's analysis of existence and pushed it toward ethics and politics. Where Heidegger was obscure and eventually compromised by Nazism, Sartre wrote plays, novels and journalism, and made the philosophy a public argument.
Core arguments
- 01
Existence precedes essence
There is no human nature that determines what you should be.
A paper knife is made to a design that exists before it does. If there is no designer, humans have no such prior specification: we exist first and define ourselves afterwards, through action. Any appeal to "that's just how I am" therefore describes a history of choices rather than a fixed nature.
- 02
Condemned to be free
You cannot avoid choosing, and refusing to choose is itself a choice.
Freedom is not a pleasant possession but a condition you did not consent to and cannot resign from. Even under coercion, the meaning of your situation depends on how you take it up. This produces anguish, because there is no authority to hand the decision to.
- 03
Bad faith
We constantly lie to ourselves that we had no choice.
Bad faith means treating yourself as a fixed object rather than a free subject: the waiter who plays at being nothing but a waiter, the person who says their character made them do it. It is unstable because you must know the truth in order to hide it from yourself, which is why it takes constant maintenance.
- 04
The look
Being seen by another person turns you into an object in their world.
Caught peering through a keyhole, you experience shame, and shame is the recognition that you are being seen as something with fixed properties. The other's freedom makes you an object in a way you cannot control, which is the permanent friction in every relationship.
Commonly got wrong
- "Hell is other people" is a line spoken by a damned character in a play about three people locked together forever. It refers to being fixed by another's gaze, not to a general misanthropy.
- Existentialism is not "do whatever you feel like". Sartre's point is that radical freedom brings total responsibility, since in choosing you also propose an image of what a person should be.
- Being and Nothingness has no worked-out ethics; the promised sequel never appeared. Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity is the closest thing to the missing volume, and it is hers.
Works
Nausea 1938
A novel that stages the contingency of existence more effectively than the treatises.
Being and Nothingness 1943
Roughly 800 pages of phenomenology. The waiter and the keyhole are here.
No Exit 1944
A one-act play, three characters, one room, no exit. The source of a badly misused line.
Existentialism Is a Humanism 1946
A public lecture answering critics. Simplified, and he later regretted parts of it, but it is where to begin.
Critique of Dialectical Reason 1960
The Marxist turn, attempting to fit existential freedom inside historical materialism.
Existentialism Is a Humanism. It is a lecture, it is short, and it answers the obvious objections in order.
Why they still get taught
He made philosophy a public activity again, through novels, plays and journalism, and gave the twentieth century its vocabulary for authenticity, self-deception and responsibility.
Chapters
- Existence Precedes Essence · Freedom & Meaning
- Free Will vs Determinism · Mind & Modern Ideas