Jean-Paul Sartre

Key ideas

1. Consciousness is not a thing. Following Husserl, Sartre holds that every consciousness is consciousness of something, so there is no inner container to look into. In The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) he argues that the ego is an object in the world, like any other, and not an owner of consciousness.
2. Existence precedes essence. Humans have no nature given in advance by a creator or a design. First we exist, then we define ourselves by what we do: in Existentialism Is a Humanism he says that “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself”.
3. Being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Things simply are what they are, which Sartre calls being-in-itself. Consciousness, being-for-itself, is never just what it is: it can negate, imagine what is absent and step back from any situation, and in that sense nothingness enters the world through it.
4. Radical freedom and anguish. No fact about our situation settles how we take it, so we are “condemned” to be free: we did not choose to exist, yet cannot escape responsibility for what we do. Anguish is the awareness of this, and of acting, in choosing for oneself, as a legislator for all humanity.
5. Bad faith. Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is self-deception about one’s own freedom, in which a person escapes the anguish of choosing by treating herself as simply what her role, character or past makes her. Sartre’s example is a café waiter, who is a waiter only “in the mode of being what I am not”.
6. The look and other people. Caught peeping through a keyhole, I suddenly see myself as an object in someone else’s eyes, and feel shame. Sartre takes such experiences to show, without any inference, that other subjects exist, and the idea runs through his play No Exit, whose most quoted line is “Hell is other people”.
7. Freedom and history. After the war Sartre sought to join existentialism to Marxism. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he introduces the practico-inert, the hardened results of past action that confront people as a force of necessity, and places freedom in groups acting together against it.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French philosopher, novelist, playwright and political activist, the thinker most closely identified with existentialism. His main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), argues that human consciousness is radically free and that people are therefore responsible for what they make of themselves. He drew first on phenomenology, later on Marxism.

Who was Sartre?

He was born in Paris and studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir. He failed the agrégation, the examination for teaching posts, at his first attempt and took first place at his second, with Beauvoir second. In 1933–34 he studied Husserl at the French Institute in Berlin. Captured in 1940, he spent about nine months as a prisoner of war, reading Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Released in 1941, he published Being and Nothingness in occupied Paris in 1943 and the play No Exit in 1944. His lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, given at the end of 1945 and published in 1946, brought his ideas to a wide public, and in 1945 he co-founded the review Les Temps modernes. He declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. He died in Paris on 15 April 1980, and tens of thousands followed the funeral procession.

What does “existence precedes essence” mean?

Sartre’s example for the formula is the paper-knife. Whoever makes one has a concept of it and a purpose for it, so its essence comes before its existence. If there is no God to hold a concept of human beings, he argues, there is no human nature given in advance. We first exist, encounter ourselves in the world and define ourselves afterwards: existence precedes essence.

Why are we “condemned to be free”?

From Husserl, Sartre took intentionality: every consciousness is consciousness of something, so consciousness is not a thing inside the head. In Being and Nothingness he contrasts being-in-itself, the dense being of things, with being-for-itself, which is consciousness. Things simply are what they are; consciousness is never simply what it is, because it can negate, imagine what is absent and step back from any situation.

That grounds his view of freedom. No fact about my situation, not even poverty, settles how I take it. So “man is condemned to be free”, as he says in the lecture, in Philip Mairet’s translation: condemned because he did not create himself, yet at liberty, and answerable for everything he does. Sartre does not say that we can do anything we like. Our situation, body and history are given; what he denies is that they decide what they mean for us. Anguish is the awareness of that responsibility.

What is bad faith?

Freedom is hard to bear, and Sartre’s name for the flight from it is bad faith, mauvaise foi. His example is a café waiter absorbed in his part. The waiter is a waiter, Sartre grants, but not as a table is a table: he is one “in the mode of being what I am not”. The counterpart ideal is authenticity, which means acknowledging the freedom that bad faith evades.

What is the look?

Sartre’s answer to the problem of other minds is a scene. I am peeping through a keyhole, absorbed in what I see. I hear footsteps, and at once I am an object in someone else’s eyes, and ashamed. The experience is immediate; no inference from behaviour is needed. Other people are those who can make me an object, which is the thought behind “Hell is other people”, the line spoken in No Exit.

Freedom, Marxism and politics

After the war Sartre argued that writers must be engaged in the struggles of their time, and he moved left. He never joined the French Communist Party, but for some years he defended the Soviet Union, and Merleau-Ponty called him an “ultra-Bolshevik”. His quarrel with Camus over The Rebel (1951) ended their friendship. He opposed French rule in Algeria, and in 1966–67 he joined Bertrand Russell in organising the tribunal on American conduct in Vietnam that bears Russell’s name.

His late theory joins existentialism to Marxism. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) the key concept is the practico-inert: the hardened results of past action, which confront people as necessity and turn the producer into his product. Freedom now lies in groups acting together against it, not only in individual choice. In Search for a Method (1957) he wrote that historical materialism was the only valid interpretation of history, and existentialism the only concrete approach to reality.

What do critics say?

Heidegger answered in his Letter on Humanism that reversing the old priority of essence over existence leaves one inside metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse objected that Being and Nothingness treats features of one historical condition as features of existence as such. His defence of the Soviet Union in the early 1950s was criticised in his lifetime and since.

How to start reading Sartre

Begin with Existentialism Is a Humanism, then No Exit, then the chapters of Being and Nothingness on bad faith and on the look. His English translations are in copyright, so there is no free full text to link; the Stanford Encyclopedia entry is a free guide, and how to read philosophy helps with difficult books.

The UGC NET syllabus lists “Sartre: Concept of Freedom, Bad-faith, Humanism” under Unit 6, and UPSC Philosophy Paper I names existentialism. See the UGC NET guide and the UPSC guide.