Sartre: Freedom, Bad Faith, and the Thesis that Existence Precedes Essence
“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. ...