Existence precedes essence: we are condemned to be free

The paper-knife and "condemned to be free" (Sartre)

Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 · 1980Existence precedes essence: we are condemned to be free.

What it claims

Man is free and responsible for everything he does, without excuse. He is "condemned to be free": condemned, because he did not create himself; free, because once thrown into the world he answers for everything.

Why

Without a God to design man, there is no human nature: man exists first and defines himself afterwards.

In short

"Existence precedes essence: we are condemned to be free" is an argument by Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism Is a Humanism (lecture of 1945), §6-11; Being and Nothingness, IV, 1, I (1943)) on the question "Are we free?" (answer: free will). Its claim: Man is free and responsible for everything he does, without excuse. He is "condemned to be free": condemned, because he did not create himself; free, because once thrown into the world he answers for everything. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 6 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Existentialism Is a Humanism (lecture of 1945), §6-11; Being and Nothingness, IV, 1, I (1943)

Valid with an implicit premise

A paper-knife is made by an artisan who knows beforehand what it is for: its definition (its essence) exists before it does. Sartre asks: is it the same for a human being? If God were the artisan, yes: each of us would be the realisation of a concept of man already thought out. But Sartre starts from the principle that God does not exist. Then no concept precedes man: he exists first, and defines himself afterwards by what he does. With no given nature, and no character or passion that excuses him from answering for himself, he has no excuse. Sartre calls this being "condemned to be free". It is not a gift, it is a weight. Note: atheism here is a starting premise, which Sartre does not prove.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a world with no God and no human nature, where passion and temperament explain nothing, yet where acts are fully caused, for example by the state of the brain and by upbringing. In that world one would not be free in Sartre's sense.

Valid with P5. From P1 and P2 it follows that there is no human nature; with P3, that it therefore explains no act; P4 rules out other causes; P5 concludes that man is free; P6 adds responsibility. The weak point is P5: it assumes that nature, passion and temperament are the only possible causes. Its opponents add others: the brain, genes, social structures, physical causes in general.

Analogy. A paper-knife leaves the workshop with its function written in advance. Imagine instead a pupil starting upper school with no path chosen by anyone: she can be given advice, but she will have to choose her own way and answer for it, and no one will be able to say "it was written". Sartre says the human being is in this second case, for his whole life.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Aristotle 330 BC · attacks premise 2

One does not need a craftsman God to have a nature. In Aristotle, the nature of a being is the form that is in the being itself: man is "by nature a political animal", and man's good lies in his proper function. No designer made man like a paper-knife. So one can remove God and keep a human nature.

no reply

We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) Sartre does not answer Aristotle, whom he does not name in the lecture. He only says that the eighteenth-century atheists (Diderot, Voltaire, Kant) kept the idea of a human nature after removing God, and sees a leftover in it. Later he accepts a "human universality of condition" (being in the world, at work, among others, mortal), but not an essence. An Aristotelian would reply that this common condition is already a nature, and that Sartre changes the word more than the thing.

Arthur Schopenhauer 1839 · attacks premise 4

Character is the empirically known, constant and unchangeable essence of an individual will. Everyone is born with his own. A coward placed in the same situation will therefore act in the same way: he did not make himself a coward by his acts, his acts show what he already was.

Sartre replies

Sartre Sartre's reply (1945), who does not name Schopenhauer

The coward is not like that on account of a cowardly heart, lungs or cerebrum, nor through his physiological organism: he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions. There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament.

The debate goes on (our summary) Sartre targets the temperament of the body (blood, brain), whereas Schopenhauer speaks of a character of the will, not only of the body. Sartre adds (§17) that there is always a possibility for the coward to stop being one, but in the lecture he asserts it without proving it. The debate is open: do past acts show what one chose, or what one already was?

Baruch Spinoza 1674 · attacks the conclusion

This freedom of which men are so proud consists only in the fact that they know their desire through consciousness, without knowing the causes that determine it. Like a thrown stone that would think itself free, we mistake our ignorance of causes for freedom.

Sartre replies

Sartre Sartre's reply to determinism in general (1943); he does not name Spinoza here

Sartre holds that only two solutions are possible: either man is wholly determined, which he finds inadmissible because a determined consciousness, that is, one motivated from outside, becomes pure exteriority and ceases to be consciousness; or else man is wholly free.

The debate goes on (our summary) Sartre rejects determinism more than he refutes it: "inadmissible" is a judgement, and it assumes that a determined consciousness would cease to be consciousness. A Spinozist would reply that a thought can be caused without ceasing to be a thought. Elsewhere (IV, 1, I), Sartre offers another reading: believing in determinism is trying to grasp oneself as a thing, hence fleeing one's freedom. Spinoza would say this is exactly the illusion he describes.

Benjamin Libet and colleagues (neuroscience) 1983 · attacks premise 4

When subjects are asked to flex the wrist whenever they like, the brain activity that prepares the movement begins before they are aware of having decided it. Libet concludes that the cerebral initiation of a "freely voluntary" act can begin unconsciously. If so, our acts are caused by the brain before they are chosen.

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in 1983, after the author's death (1980).

The debate goes on (our summary) The experiment dates from 1983, three years after Sartre's death. A defender of Sartre notes that, for him, deliberate will is not "the unique or at least the privileged manifestation of freedom" (Being and Nothingness, IV, 1, I), and that the fundamental choice is not a deliberate one: movements prepared unconsciously do not necessarily touch what he calls freedom. But Sartre also writes that deciding under the effect of circumstances suppresses freedom. Libet himself keeps a conscious "veto" and does not conclude there is no free will.

Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism 1947 · attacks premise 3

Saying "existence precedes essence" only reverses a sentence of metaphysics ("essence precedes existence") without leaving metaphysics. And what Sartre calls existence, a project and a choice of man, is not what Heidegger means by the word in Being and Time. The letter, written in 1946 and published in 1947, explicitly discusses Sartre's phrase.

no reply

We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) We found no direct reply from Sartre to this letter in our corpus. Heidegger's text is there, in translation only (Capuzzi's English, Munier's French): "the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement". The lecture nevertheless presents Heidegger as a source for Sartre, who borrows "human reality" and "forlornness" from him (§8, §11). The quarrel is about what the word "existence" means.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind and structuralism 1962 · attacks the conclusion

Man is not the free source of his choices. A society's language, kinship rules and myths think through individuals more than individuals invent them. Starting from a subject who defines himself is starting from an illusion that the human sciences must explain, not from a foundation.

no reply

summary: their text is not yet in our corpus

We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss mainly targets the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) rather than the 1945 lecture. Sartre, still alive, answered structuralism in interviews we do not have: this objection is given without a quotation, as a summary of the position. It does not target only P4. It challenges the very idea of a subject who chooses himself, although in the lecture Sartre already accepts limits common to all, a "human universality of condition" (§20).