Jean-Paul Sartre
Existence precedes essence: we are condemned to be free.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980, France) : existentialism. For Sartre, there is neither a God nor a human nature that would decide in advance what we are. A human being exists first, then defines himself by his choices and acts: "existence precedes essence". On AskPhilosophy: 5 reconstructed arguments, 6 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 4 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
Sartre is the French face of existentialism. He wrote very demanding philosophy (Being and Nothingness, 1943), but also novels, plays and articles for the general public. His phrase "existence precedes essence" and his idea of bad faith have become reference points for talking about freedom, responsibility and the choices of a life. Many people know him only through isolated sentences, often misread: this page puts the context back.
His times
He taught philosophy, was called up and then taken prisoner during the Second World War, and published Being and Nothingness under the German Occupation. In his 1945 lecture he recalls a pupil who hesitated, under the Occupation, between staying with his mother and joining the Free French Forces. After the war he became one of the best-known voices in Paris, with Simone de Beauvoir. He refused the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. He died in 1980.
Mind what you quote
The lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" is a spoken talk, taken down in shorthand then published: it is not a written treatise. Our French text is an unproofread online transcription, and the English text is Philip Mairet's 1948 translation, aligned by machine. For Being and Nothingness we only have extracts, from unproofread OCR. Finally, the lines of No Exit belong to its characters: "hell is other people" is spoken by Garcin.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe calls himself an "atheist existentialist". But he does not try to prove that God does not exist: even if God did exist, he says, it would change nothing, because man must find himself again. In the lecture, the absence of God is a starting point, not a conclusion.
His starting point is the truth that consciousness reaches about itself, Descartes's "I think, therefore I am". The lecture does not address empiricism versus rationalism: this placement is provisional.
Only one absolute truth at the start: consciousness reaching itself. Outside this cogito, he says, all objects are only probable.
He refuses to treat man as an object, as "all kinds of materialism" do, and holds that a consciousness wholly determined from outside would cease to be consciousness. But he does not speak of a soul: neither classical dualism nor materialism. This placement is debated.
"There is no determinism; man is free, man is freedom." For him, man is wholly free or not free at all: he cannot be free by moments. Whoever appeals to passion or to some determinism deceives himself (bad faith).
There is no good "a priori", written nowhere: if God does not exist, someone must invent values. Yet he holds that one can be mistaken about one's own freedom (bad faith), and he asks us to will the freedom of others.
No faith: nothing can save man from himself, "not even a valid proof of the existence of God". But reason does not judge everything either: values are chosen, not demonstrated. This axis fits him poorly.
"There is no sense in life a priori." Before one lives, life is nothing, and it is up to each person to give it a sense. Sartre does not conclude to the absurd or to despair: he speaks of a meaning to create.
There is no human nature, so none that is good or bad to begin with. One becomes a coward or a hero through one's acts, and can always stop being one. There remains a "condition" common to all: being in the world, at work, among others, mortal.
He starts from the free individual, who must commit himself and act. But this freedom faces others: one cannot will one's own freedom without willing that of others. His postwar political positions are not in our corpus: provisional placement.
Neither a calculation of consequences nor a simple rule of duty: freedom is the foundation of values, and in choosing oneself one chooses for all men. Some readers see an ethics close to Kant's (the general rule returns), others an ethics of value creation.