Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 -1980) was France’s most important philosopher for much of the twentieth-

century as well as an important novelist and playwright. Sartre is classified as an existentialist. This
means at least three things. Sartre is interested in: 1) the uniqueness of an individual life, not abstract
theories about a shared human nature; 2) the meaning of life from a subjective point of view; and 3) the
freedom to choose one’s projects, meanings, and values. To better grasp existentialism, here is a very
brief sketch of some of a few of the philosophers who influenced Sartre.

Much of Sartre’s work originates from and is influenced by his experiences as a

Frenchman in Nazi occupied France. His focus on choice was surely influenced by the
choice that the French faced: collaboration, resistance, or quiet self-preservation. He
later became a Marxist, although he thought Marxist philosophy would benefit by
emphasizing freedom.
Sartre distinguishes human consciousness and inanimate non-consciousness. This is
not a distinction between two different substances, it is not a mind/body dualism, but
between “two modes of being.” One is the way conscious beings exist—being for
itself—the other the way non-conscious things exist—being in itself. Consciousness is
always about something, including sometimes itself, whereas inanimate things are not
conscious. [He’s trying to get at what it is to be, to be conscious, to be human.] The
other main foundation of Sartre’s thought is his thoroughgoing atheism. He
assumed that there are no transcendent values, and no intrinsic meaning or purpose for
our lives. Life is absurd, we are forlorn. We have to grow up and choose our own values
and projects. The meaning of life isn’t something discovered, but something we create.
We must give our lives meaning.
Sartre doesn’t believe in a human nature or essence that precedes individuals. Rather
our existence precedes our essence; we have to create our own essence. Nothing,
not god or evolution, created us for any purpose other than the purposes we choose. Of
course Sartre recognizes that we are biological beings, but there are no general truths
about what we should or ought to be. The most basic thing we can say about humans is
that they are radically free, to be anything except to not be free.
Consciousness is also aware that it is not the objects it ponders, that many things
are not the case, and that we lack many things. The concept of nothingness or
negation relates to freedom for Sartre. For the ability to conceive of what’s not the
case—I could have done that—implies the freedom to imagine and choose other
possibilities. In large part consciousness is this conceiving or desiring things to be
different—not to be as they are. Negation implies freedom of mind and of action.” 1.
Existence Precedes Essence. This is Sartre's central slogan. In the case of an artifact produced by an
artisan for a definite purpose, essence precedes existence: the artificer works from a design-plan which
is logically antecedent to the actual existence of the artifact. So the essence or nature of the thing to be
produced — Sartre gives the example of a knife — precedes the existence of the thing produced. But
man according to Sartre has no essence or nature prior to his existence. Having no nature, man has no
Aristotelean proper function. So man qua man has no purpose; any purpose an individual human being
has he has given to himself. In man, then, existence precedes essence. But why exactly? ". . . there is no
human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it." (349) The argument seems to be:

There is no God

Essences or natures are divine concepts

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There is no human nature.

Another argument Sartre may have in mind is this:

Man has a nature only if man is a divine artifact

There is no God and hence no divine artifacts

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Man has no nature.

Man as 'thrown project,' geworfenes Entwurf in Heidegger's lingo. "Man is indeed a project which
possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus, or a cauliflower." (349)

To appreciate what Sartre is saying, you must appreciate that he is referring to man as subject, man as a
conscious and self-conscious being, not man as member of a zoological species. A good Cartesian, Sartre
philosophizes from the first-person point of view. He is right to do so, because if you try to understand
human reality in wholly objective, third-personal, terms, you will fail. You will fail because you will have
left out the Main Thing: subjectivity.

The problem with all this is that Sartre, denying God, puts man in God's place: he ascribes to man a type
of freedom and a type of responsibility that he cannot possibly possess, that only God can possess. He
fails to see that human freedom is in no way diminished by an individual's free acceptance of an
objective constraint on his behavior. This is because human freedom is finite freedom; only an infinite
freedom, a divine freedom, would be diminished by objective constraints.

Note also there there is no man, there are only men. God is one, but man is many. So Sartre's deification
of man amounts to a deification of men: each is a god unto himself. This leads to a radical subjectivism
about value contrary to Sartre's intentions: he wants values to be intersubjectively valid. Thus he wants
somethign impossible. He wants the source of all values to be human subjectivity, which is in each case
an individual's subejctivity; but he also wants these values to be intersubjective.