Sartre and existentialism: existence precedes essence

On 29 October 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre gave a lecture in Paris called Existentialism Is a Humanism, which was published in 1946. Only months after the war ended in Europe, he explained a philosophy that had suddenly become fashionable around the cafes of Saint-Germain. Its central slogan is that existence precedes essence. When a craftsman makes a paper knife, he first has its concept, its essence, in mind, and then makes it. For humans, there is no designer and no pre-given human nature. We first appear in the world, and only afterward define ourselves through our actions. A person is nothing other than what he makes of himself.¹²³

This freedom brings a heavy responsibility. By choosing, Sartre says, each person chooses for all humanity, since to choose a course is to say it is good for anyone. He names the resulting feelings anguish, abandonment (there is no God or fixed value to rely on) and despair. To show that no rule can decide for us, he tells of a young man during the occupation torn between staying to care for his mother and leaving to join the Free French forces. No doctrine can answer for him; he must choose and thereby create his own meaning. The lecture summarizes ideas from Sartre's long book Being and Nothingness (1943), including bad faith, the self-deception by which we pretend we are not free, and it answers charges from Marxists and Catholics that existentialism is gloomy and irresponsible.²³

Sartre drew on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, and worked in partnership with Simone de Beauvoir. Heidegger rejected the label. Sartre later declined the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature.¹²