“Man is condemned to be free.” Few sentences sum up a philosopher so well, and few have been so often repeated and so badly understood. Jean-Paul Sartre was the public face of twentieth-century existentialism — novelist, playwright, militant, and intellectual celebrity — but behind the media figure lies a rigorous philosophical system built on an ontology of consciousness. This article focuses on the properly Sartrean theses: the distinction between the in-itself and the for-itself, the formula “existence precedes essence,” radical freedom and its weight, bad faith, and the experience of the Other. For an overview of the existentialist movement as a whole, see the dedicated article on existentialism.

1. Context and life

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong intellectual and romantic companion. A stay in Berlin in the early 1930s put him in direct contact with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, which would become the matrix of his thought.

A prisoner of war in 1940–41, Sartre returned to occupied France and took part in intellectual resistance. After the war he became the central figure of Parisian cultural life: he founded the journal Les Temps Modernes, turned the café into a classroom and philosophy into a public, committed practice. He drew close to Marxism without ever joining the Communist Party and, true to his refusal of institutional honors, declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. His death in 1980 brought tens of thousands into the streets of Paris.

2. The problem: a phenomenology of consciousness

Sartre’s great theoretical work is Being and Nothingness (1943), whose subtitle — “An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology” — announces the project: to describe the fundamental modes of being on the basis of the experience of consciousness. From Husserl, Sartre inherits the thesis of intentionality: all consciousness is consciousness of something; it is not a closed container full of contents but pure openness, thrown outside itself onto the world. From this insight he will draw radical consequences.

The ontology of Being and Nothingness distinguishes two irreducible modes of being:

  • The in-itself (en-soi) is the being of things: massive, full, opaque, identical to itself. A stone is what it is, with no distance and no lack; “the in-itself is what it is.”
  • The for-itself (pour-soi) is the being of consciousness. And here is the decisive thesis: consciousness is not a thing. It is, on the contrary, a nothingness (néant) at the heart of being — a negation, a lack, a distance from itself to itself. Consciousness “nihilates”: it introduces into the world the negative, absence, the possible. I am what I am not (my projects, my future) and am not what I am (my past, my roles), because I always surpass myself.

Everything else follows from this ontological structure. Since the for-itself has no fixed nature, there is no human essence given in advance. The human being is, in its innermost being, freedom.

3. Existence precedes essence

This is the formula that became existentialism’s motto, set out in the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945). To explain it, Sartre turns to a contrast with a manufactured object. A paper-knife is made by an artisan according to a prior concept: one knows in advance what it is and what it is for. In it, essence precedes existence — the plan comes before the object.

With the human being, Sartre argues (in an atheist existentialism that refuses a craftsman-God who would have conceived us according to a plan), the reverse holds. First the human being exists, surges up in the world; only afterward does he define himself. There is no human nature, because there is no God to conceive it. Man “is nothing other than what he makes of himself”: he begins by being nothing and builds himself through his choices. Existence precedes and grounds essence.

This gives individual choices a surprising weight. In choosing for myself, Sartre argues, I choose an image of man in general, of what he ought to be: my choice commits all of humanity, because it affirms a value. Hence the gravity of existentialist freedom — it is not caprice but responsibility.

4. Freedom and its weight: anguish, abandonment, responsibility

Sartrean freedom is radical and unconditional: there is no situation in which I do not have to choose, and not even the refusal to choose escapes choice. I cannot excuse myself by appealing to my nature, my temperament, my class, my past, or the divine will. This is why man is “condemned to be free”: condemned, because he did not choose to exist; free, because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

This freedom has three affective tonalities, described by Sartre:

  • Anguish (angoisse) is the reflective consciousness of one’s own freedom. It is not fear of an object but the vertigo before the fact that nothing outside me grounds my values and decisions.
  • Abandonment (délaissement) is the situation of man without God: deprived of any transcendent foundation for morality, he finds no values inscribed in the heavens and no excuses for his failings. “We are alone, without excuses,” Sartre sums up.
  • Despair (désespoir), finally, is not pessimism but the disposition to act without guarantees: to count only on what depends on one’s own will, without expecting the world to conspire in favor of our projects.

5. Bad faith (mauvaise foi)

The weight of freedom is so great that the constant temptation is to flee it. To this flight Sartre gives the name bad faith (mauvaise foi) — one of his most celebrated analyses. Bad faith is a form of lying to oneself: unlike ordinary lying, in which the liar knows the truth he hides from another, in bad faith the deceiver and the deceived are the same consciousness. It is a paradox explicable only because the human being is not massive like a thing but divided between facticity (what one already is) and transcendence (what one projects to be).

Sartre offers examples that have become classics. The café waiter who performs his gestures with excessive zeal, “playing at” being a waiter as though that were his essence, strains to coincide with a role — so as not to have to admit that he could, at any moment, be something else. The woman on a first date who pretends not to notice her companion’s intention, leaving her own hand abandoned like an inert object, dissociates herself from her body so as not to decide. In every case, bad faith consists in treating oneself as pure in-itself (a determined thing) or as pure transcendence (unfettered freedom), denying that we are always, inseparably, both. The opposite of bad faith would be authenticity: lucidly assuming one’s own freedom and one’s own condition.

6. The Other and the look

The third part of Being and Nothingness deals with the existence of others — being-for-others. Here Sartre is a direct heir of the Hegelian dialectic of recognition (see the master–slave dialectic in Hegel), but he gives it a distinctive and darker cast.

The fundamental experience of the Other, for Sartre, is the look (le regard). As long as I look at the world, I am the free center around which everything is organized. But when I feel the look of another upon me, something is inverted: the Other apprehends me as an object, fixes me, assigns me a nature (“the curious one,” “the shy one,” “the coward”), and my world drains away toward him. Shame is the immediate proof of this objectification: I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other. The Other’s look steals my transcendence and turns it into facticity.

Hence the famous line from the play No Exit (1944): “hell is other people.” The line is almost always misread as misanthropy. Sartre himself clarified its meaning: it is not that living with others is always hellish, but that, when our relations with others are distorted, we become prisoners of others’ judgment. Since we know ourselves in part through the eyes of others, if that gaze imprisons us, the Other becomes our hell. In the ontology of Being and Nothingness, the relation to others tends toward conflict — each freedom seeking, in vain, to recover its sovereignty before the freedom that looks at it.

7. Commitment and the turn to Marxism

Sartre never separated philosophy from action. He defended a committed literature, in which the writer takes political responsibility for his words, and became a leading figure in the great causes of the postwar era — anticolonialism, criticism of the Vietnam War, May 1968.

On the theoretical plane, maturity brought a problem: how to reconcile the individual freedom, affirmed almost absolutely in 1943, with the evident weight of economic and historical conditions? The answer came in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), an attempt to fuse existentialism and Marxism. Sartre comes to think freedom as situated, confronted with scarcity and with what he calls the practico-inert — the weight of the material structures and institutions we inherit. Freedom does not disappear, but it always acts from circumstances it did not choose. It is Sartre’s version of an insight Marx had already formulated: human beings make their own history, but under conditions they did not choose.

Critical analysis

The most persistent objection concerns the absolute character of freedom in the early Sartre. To assign the individual total responsibility seems to ignore the crushing weight of circumstance — poverty, oppression, trauma. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist close to Sartre, objected that freedom is always situated and bodily, interwoven with the world, and that the rigid opposition between in-itself and for-itself oversimplifies embodied existence. There is also the controversy over psychoanalysis: Sartre rejects the Freudian unconscious (which would remove responsibility from the subject) and replaces it with bad faith — a solution many find ingenious but insufficient to explain our own opacity to ourselves.

Marxists, for their part, accused existentialism of bourgeois individualism and judged the late synthesis of the Critique of Dialectical Reason unstable. Finally, Heidegger himself, in the Letter on Humanism (1947), rejected the humanist reading Sartre had made of his work, arguing that the formula “existence precedes essence” remained trapped in the very metaphysics he sought to overcome.

Legacy

Sartre’s influence was immense. His philosophy of freedom and responsibility shaped the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir — whose thesis “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” is a direct application of “existence precedes essence” — and the anticolonial critique of Frantz Fanon, whom Sartre prefaced. It provided the model of the committed intellectual that marked an entire era. In psychology, it inspired existential psychotherapy; in literature and theater, it left masterpieces such as Nausea and No Exit. More than a set of doctrines, Sartrism bequeathed a persistent ethical demand: the refusal of excuses and the courage to assume, without alibis, what we make of ourselves.

  • Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943) — the central ontological work; dense but decisive on the in-itself, the for-itself, bad faith, and the look.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945) — the accessible lecture that sets out “existence precedes essence” and committed freedom.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938) — the novel that dramatizes contingency and the in-itself.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit (1944) — the play of “hell is other people.”
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) — the attempted synthesis with Marxism.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981) — a biographical account of Sartre’s final years.

See also: Existentialism: freedom in Sartre, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard · Hegel: the master–slave dialectic

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