Jean-Paul Sartre · Philosophy
Sartre’s founding formula: a human being has no fixed nature given in advance. Unlike a manufactured object, we first exist - thrown into the world without a blueprint - and only afterward define what we are, through our choices. We are, Sartre says, ‘condemned to be free.’
In a 1945 Paris lecture, delivered to an overflowing crowd just after the Second World War, Jean-Paul Sartre compressed his philosophy into a single phrase: existence precedes essence. To see what he meant, he asked his audience to think about a manufactured object - a paper-knife. Before the knife exists, there is already in the mind of the artisan a concept of it: what it is for, how it will be made, what shape it must take. Its essence - the formula and properties that make it that kind of thing - comes before its existence. The knife is, in this sense, defined before it is born. For most of Western history, Sartre observed, human beings were thought of the same way: God was the supreme artisan who conceived humanity according to a plan, so that ‘human nature’ existed in the divine mind before any individual was born. On this older picture, essence precedes existence for us too.
Sartre was an atheist, and he drew the consequence with relentless logic. If there is no God, then there is no divine artisan, and therefore no pre-existing concept of ‘human nature’ in any mind. There is no blueprint we are made to fit, no purpose stamped on us before we arrive. And so, for the human being alone among things, existence precedes essence. We first turn up, exist, burst onto the scene - and only afterwards, through the whole course of our lives, do we define what we are. “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself,” Sartre wrote. There is no human nature, because there is no God to conceive it. A person is, at the start, nothing - not in the sense of being worthless, but in the sense of being undefined, an open question whose answer is not yet written. What you are is not a fact you discover but a task you accomplish, choice by choice, until you die.
Sartre’s formula has two faces, and he wanted his audience to feel both. On one side it is exhilarating and ennobling: you are not the prisoner of a fixed type, not reducible to your past, your class, your psychology, or any label. At every moment you remain free to redefine yourself; the future is genuinely open, and your life is your own work of art and your own responsibility. This is the dignity of the human being - that, unlike the stone or the knife, we are not finished, not pinned down, but always more than any description of us. On the other side the formula is vertiginous and terrifying: with no nature to lean on and no God to consult, there is no external authority that can tell you what to do or relieve you of the weight of deciding. You cannot pass the buck - not to nature, not to God, not to society. Every value you live by, you have in some sense chosen and so endorsed. To grasp ‘existence precedes essence’ fully is to feel both the freedom and the dread it brings - and the rest of Sartre’s philosophy unfolds what that condition is like to live.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Sartre, existence precedes essence : there is no human nature fixed in advance, because there is no God or designer to fix it. We first exist, then define ourselves by what we do. Explain the paper-knife contrast and why it leads to radical responsibility.
Leads to Aristotle.
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