Philosophy
1905 to 1980, Paris, France
Existence precedes essence, radical freedom, bad faith, and the burden of being human.
Start learning Jean-Paul →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, thro…
If we have no fixed essence, then we are radically free - and Sartre means this almost without limit. The deepest threat to such freedom is not the tyrant but ourselves: bad faith (mauvaise foi), the self-deception by w…
Other people change everything. Under the gaze of another, Sartre says, I am suddenly turned from a free subject into an object - fixed, judged, an outside seen by eyes I cannot see from. ‘The Look’ reveals…
With no God and no fixed values, where do we get our morality? Sartre’s answer is unflinching: we invent it, and we know we are inventing it. He explores the three moods this produces - anguish , abandonment , and…
Accused of gloom, of nihilism, of dwelling on the sordid, Sartre rose to defend his philosophy as a humanism : the most optimistic of doctrines because it places human destiny in human hands. This lesson follows his gre…
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