Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence, and That Is Terrifying
Jean-Paul Sartre walked into a café in Paris and watched the waiter.
The waiter’s movements were too precise, too perfectly waiter-like. He carried his tray with a rigidity that was almost theatrical. His walk, his tone, his attentiveness, all of it performed with a slightly excessive care, as if he were playing the role of waiter rather than being a waiter.
Sartre watched him and thought: this man is in bad faith.
Not because he is lying, and not because he is a bad person. Because he is pretending, to himself and to the world, that he is a waiter in the same way a rock is a rock.
As if his identity were fixed, as if he had no choice, as if the role explained the man rather than the man choosing the role.
This moment, in a Paris café, watching an ordinary man do his job, became one of the most famous examples in the history of philosophy.
Because it points to something Sartre believed with absolute conviction:
You are never just what you are.
You are always also the one who chose it, and who could choose otherwise.
I. The Man
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905.
His father died when he was fifteen months old. His mother returned to her parents’ house. He grew up in the library of his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer (uncle of Albert Schweitzer), surrounded by books, convinced from childhood that literature was the highest calling.
He was, by most accounts, not physically attractive: short, wall-eyed, increasingly blind. He compensated with a ferocious intelligence and an extraordinary capacity for work.
He studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, his partner, intellectual companion, and the most important relationship of his life.
They never married. They maintained a relationship of radical honesty, transparent about their other relationships, committed to each other without possession. Whether this worked, for de Beauvoir, is a question the letters complicate.
He was drafted in World War II, captured by the Germans in 1940, held in a prisoner of war camp for nine months. He was released, apparently on medical grounds, and returned to Paris, where he wrote philosophy and plays while the city was occupied.
After the war, he became the most famous intellectual in France, perhaps in the world.
He refused the Nobel Prize in 1964. He said that accepting it would compromise the independence of the writer.
He died in 1980, nearly blind, exhausted, still writing, still engaged, refusing to be reduced to what he had been.
II. Existence Precedes Essence
The central claim of Sartrean existentialism is condensed in a single phrase:
Existence precedes essence.
To understand what this means, consider a paper knife.
A paper knife is made by an artisan who has a concept of the knife before making it: a purpose, a design, an essence. The essence precedes the existence. The knife exists in order to cut paper. Its being is determined by its function.
For centuries, theistic philosophy applied this logic to human beings: God created humans with a purpose, a nature, an essence. Human beings exist in order to fulfill this divine design. The essence precedes the existence.
Sartre removes God.
Without God, there is no prior conception of the human. There is no factory blueprint, no divine intention, no human nature in the traditional sense.
Human beings simply appear, thrown into existence, without prior purpose or predetermined nature, and then must decide what they are.
“Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, and defines himself afterwards.”
You are not a human being with a fixed nature who then makes choices within that nature. You are the choices you make: the sum of your acts, your commitments, your projects.
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
This is the most liberating and the most terrifying sentence in existentialist philosophy.
Liberating: you are not fixed. Your past does not determine you. Your family, your culture, your psychology, none of these are your destiny. You can always choose otherwise.
Terrifying: there is no excuse. There is no nature to blame, no God, no circumstances sufficient to explain why you are what you are.
You have chosen, you are choosing, you will choose.
III. Radical Freedom and Its Weight
Sartre’s freedom is not the freedom of pleasant choices.
It is radical freedom: freedom that cannot be escaped, freedom that is itself a burden.
“We are condemned to be free.”
The word condemned is precise. Not gifted with freedom, not blessed by it. Condemned to it.
The condemnation: you cannot not choose. Refusing to choose, following orders, acting out of habit: each of these is a choice in disguise.
There is no alibi.
This is what makes existence anguish, Sartre’s term for the fundamental anxiety of recognizing your own freedom.
When you stand at the edge of a cliff, there is a specific anxiety: not just the fear of falling, but the recognition that you could jump. Nothing prevents you but yourself. The abyss opens not below you but within you.
Anguish, in Sartre, is the recognition that nothing compels me to be what I am.
You might not jump. You almost certainly won’t. But the recognition that you could is the existential structure of freedom: the choice is always there, and you are always the one holding yourself back.
IV. Bad Faith
If radical freedom is the truth of human existence, if you are always choosing and responsible and the author of what you are, why do so many people act as if they are not?
Because freedom is unbearable.
Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre’s name for the various strategies by which human beings flee from their freedom, by which they convince themselves that they are not really choosing, but determined, with no option.
The waiter who is too perfectly a waiter, he is in bad faith. He is pretending that his role defines him completely, that the waiter is what he is, rather than what he does.
The woman on a date who ignores the unambiguous romantic intentions of her companion, she is in bad faith. She does not want to acknowledge the situation because acknowledging it would require a choice. So she pretends not to see it.
The person who says “I had no choice,” who uses their psychology, their upbringing, their past as a complete explanation for their present, is in bad faith.
These are not moral failures exactly. They are failures of honesty: the refusal to acknowledge what one actually is, a being who is always choosing, with full freedom and full responsibility.
Bad faith is the attempt to flee what cannot be fled.
V. The Look
One of Sartre’s most striking contributions to philosophy is his analysis of the Look (le regard).
Imagine you are alone. You are doing something you would not do if anyone were watching, looking through a keyhole, perhaps.
Then you hear footsteps. You sense someone behind you.
In that moment, something happens.
You are suddenly seen. And being seen transforms you, from the free subject experiencing the world to an object in someone else’s world.
The Look of the Other fixes you, temporarily and uncomfortably, as a thing. It assigns you an identity, a nature, a description.
“Hell is other people.”
This is the most misquoted line in Sartre, usually taken to mean that other people are unpleasant, which is not what he meant.
It means: other people’s gaze is a kind of hell because it threatens to fix you as an object, to reduce your radical freedom to a thing with properties.
The waiter, the coward, the saint: these are descriptions others use to reduce you. You are always more than any description. But the Look presses you toward the description, and the constant negotiation between what you are for yourself and what you are for others is one of the fundamental tensions of human existence.
VI. Authenticity
If bad faith is the flight from freedom, authenticity is its opposite: the honest acknowledgment of your freedom, your responsibility, your situation.
Authenticity is not a moral code. Sartre is explicit: there are no objective values, no given moral rules, no external standard by which to judge choices.
Authenticity is a formal value. It describes the quality of the relation between the agent and their choices, not the content of the choices themselves.
The authentic person chooses, knowing they are choosing, knowing the choice is theirs and cannot be blamed on God or nature or psychology or culture.
They choose and they own the choice.
This does not mean anything goes.
In his lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945), Sartre argued that in choosing for oneself, one implicitly chooses for all humanity, because to choose is to assert that the chosen value is worthy of choice, and therefore worthy for anyone in a similar situation.
“When we choose, we choose for all humanity.”
This is existentialism’s attempt to generate moral seriousness without moral realism, to preserve responsibility and obligation in a world without God, without fixed human nature, without objective values.
Whether it succeeds is debated. That it takes the problem seriously is not.
VII. Sartre and History
Sartre’s later work moved increasingly toward Marxism, an attempt to synthesize existentialism with a structural account of history and class.
The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) is his most ambitious and most difficult work, an attempt to ground Marxist historical analysis in the existentialist account of human freedom.
The basic problem he was trying to solve: existentialism emphasizes individual freedom and responsibility. Marxism emphasizes structural determination: class, history, material conditions.
How do you hold both?
Sartre’s answer, echoing Marx: human beings make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing. Freedom is always situated, always operating within structures that it did not create and cannot simply transcend.
The poor person is free, but their freedom is exercised in conditions of scarcity and oppression that constrain what their freedom can mean.
This is a genuine advance on pure existentialism. Freedom is not abstract. It has different weights in different conditions. The philosophical task is not just to describe freedom but to fight for the conditions in which freedom becomes real.
VIII. Being and Nothingness
Sartre’s major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), written and published while Paris was under German occupation, is one of the most difficult books in the philosophical canon.
Seven hundred pages of dense phenomenology, written in a style that is at once rigorous and literary, systematic and full of brilliant examples.
Its central distinction:
Being-in-itself (en-soi): The being of things, rocks, tables, paper knives. Dense, self-identical, complete. A rock is what it is. Fully. Without remainder. No gap between what it is and what it is.
Being-for-itself (pour-soi): The being of consciousness, human being. Always ahead of itself, projecting, negating what it is.
Consciousness is defined by nothingness, the gap, the lack, the not-yet, the always-exceeding of any fixed identity.
“Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question.”
You are not what you are. You are what you are not yet. The project of becoming is always you, the movement toward a future that, when reached, will already be past.
This is the formal structure of freedom: not the absence of determination, but the presence of nothingness, the gap between what you are and what you will be that is the space of choice.
IX. What Sartre Gets Right
The deepest contribution of Sartrean existentialism is the absolute refusal of the alibi.
We live in a culture of explanation. Every behavior has its cause, every failure its context. This is valuable: understanding causation matters. But Sartre preserves something that pure determinism loses, which is the reality of responsibility.
You are, within limits, the author of what you are. The limits are real and they matter. But within them, you choose. And the choosing is yours.
He also insists that identity is a project, not a possession. You are not your past, your type, your sign, your diagnosis. You are not your nationality, your class, your family. These are things you have been. What you will be is not yet determined. This is either terrifying or liberating, depending on what you were hoping your past would excuse you from.
And he insists on the seriousness of freedom. In a world where algorithms predict your choices, neuroscience explains your decisions, and your behavior seems the inevitable product of genes and environment, Sartre says: you are choosing. You are responsible. The universe does not excuse you.
This is uncomfortable. It is also the most serious respect one human being can pay to another.
X. The Café, Again
The waiter in the café, he goes home at night. He takes off the waiter’s jacket. He is no longer performing the role.
What is he then?
Sartre’s answer: exactly what he chooses to be. A husband, perhaps. A father. A reader. A man who worries about his mother. A man who sometimes laughs at things no one else finds funny.
He is none of these fully. He is always exceeding each of them.
He is the nothingness at the heart of being, the gap, the freedom, the not-yet.
“Man is not what he is, and he is what he is not.”
This sentence is not a paradox to be dissolved. It is a description of what it is to be human:
To be the being who is never simply what it is, who is always more than any description, who is always choosing, responsible, free,
even when freedom is the last thing it wants to be.
Further reading:
Sartre’s lecture Existentialism is a Humanism (1945) is the shortest entry point, readable in one evening.
The full philosophical work Being and Nothingness (1943) is the one to take next, when ready.
The novel Nausea (1938) contains the same ideas in narrative form.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) is the strongest development of existentialist ethics.
Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café (2016) is the most readable introduction to the whole movement.
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