Existence Precedes Essence

Sartre’s whole philosophy comes out of one sentence: existence precedes essence. His ethics, his account of freedom, and his account of self-deception are all consequences of it. The sentence is short and the argument behind it is short, so the risk is reading it, agreeing, and then not being able to say why it follows.

In plain words, the claim is this. A person is not made for anything. There is no blueprint, no purpose installed in advance, no set of properties you were issued and have to live up to. You show up first, and what you are gets settled afterwards, by what you do.

Two terms, because the claim is about their order.

Essence is what a thing is: the properties that define it and the purpose it was made to serve. Existence is the bare fact that the thing is there.

“Precedes” means logically prior, not earlier in time. Nobody is claiming you exist for a while and then acquire properties on a Tuesday.

1. The paper-cutter

Sartre’s example is a manufactured object. Take a paper-cutter, a blade for slitting envelopes.

Before any paper-cutter exists, someone has the concept: a thing for cutting paper, made by a particular method. The artisan does not produce the object and then wonder what it is for. The purpose and the production routine are settled in advance, and the object is made to satisfy them. Sartre’s own formulation: nobody postulates a man who produces a paper-cutter but does not know what it is used for.

So for the paper-cutter, essence precedes existence. What it is comes before the fact that it is. Sartre calls this a technical view of the world, where production precedes existence.

Now apply the same structure to a human being. If God exists and is understood as a creator, God is a superior sort of artisan. God has the concept of man, the way the manufacturer has the concept of paper-cutter, and produces individual people as realizations of that concept. On that view a human being also has an essence prior to existing: a human nature, fixed in advance, which each person instantiates.

2. Removing God does not automatically remove human nature

The eighteenth-century philosophers discarded God and kept the structure. Sartre names Diderot, Voltaire, and Kant. They dropped the creator and retained the idea that there is a human nature, a concept of the human found in every person, so that each individual is a particular example of the universal man. In Kant, Sartre says, this universality means the wild man, the natural man, and the bourgeois are all circumscribed by the same definition and have the same basic qualities.

This is what Sartre calls essentialism, and his objection is that it is incoherent without the creator. A concept has to be a concept in some mind. Take away the divine intelligence that holds the blueprint and there is no longer anything in which the human essence resides.

His position, atheistic existentialism, is that it is more coherent to draw the consequence. If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before it can be defined by any concept, and that being is man.

3. What the reversal actually says

Unpacked: first man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself.

If man as the existentialist conceives him is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.

Three consequences follow immediately, and they are worth separating because they get run together.

1. There is nothing you were made for. No purpose was installed. A paper-cutter that cuts nothing has failed; a person who does nothing in particular has not failed against any specification, because there is no specification.
2. You are what you have done, not what you contain. Sartre is precise about this: man is nothing else than his plan, exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself, and is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.
3. Willing is not the ground. By “will” we usually mean a conscious decision, and Sartre says a conscious decision is subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves. Wanting to join a party, write a book, or get married is a manifestation of an earlier, more spontaneous choice. The choosing runs deeper than deliberation.

The third point is the one most often missed. Sartre is not saying you consciously decide who to be and then execute. He is saying the deciding is happening continuously and below the level of stated intention, and your acts reveal it.

4. Why this is called subjectivism

Sartre’s opponents call the doctrine subjectivism as an insult. He accepts the word and then points out that it means two different things, and that his opponents slide between them.

Sense one: each person chooses and makes himself. This is the reversal restated, and it is the weaker claim.

Sense two: nobody can get outside human subjectivity. There is no vantage point beyond human choosing from which values could be handed down. This is the one Sartre says is the essential meaning of existentialism, and it is the claim that does the work later, because it is what rules out appealing to any authority.

Why start from Descartes’s I think. Sartre wants a doctrine based on truth rather than on hopeful theorizing, and he thinks there is exactly one truth that is absolute and immediately available: consciousness becoming aware of itself. Everything outside it is at best probable, and a claim about probability has to be anchored to something certain or it dissolves. So the starting point is not a preference for the inner life. It is the only place he thinks you can stand.

5. The universalizing move

Here the argument takes a turn that surprises most readers, since a doctrine of individual self-creation seems to point away from any obligation to others.

When we say that a man is responsible for himself, Sartre says we do not only mean he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.

The mechanism: in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

His example. A workingman chooses to join a Christian trade-union rather than be a communist, and by joining wants to show that the best thing for man is resignation, that the kingdom of man is not of this world. He is not only involving his own case. He wants to be resigned for everyone. His action has involved all humanity. Sartre gives the second, more private case as well: even if a marriage depends solely on his own circumstances or passion or wish, in marrying he is involving all humanity in monogamy.

So the image is valid for everybody and for our whole age. Responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

This move is what lets Sartre answer the charge that his ethics is arbitrary. Choice is not the selection of a private preference. It is the enactment of a claim about what a person should be.

6. Universality of condition, not of nature

Sartre denies human nature and affirms a universal human condition, and the distinction carries real weight in the text.

By condition he means the a priori limits which outline man’s fundamental situation in the universe. Historical situations vary: a man may be born a slave in a pagan society, or a feudal lord, or a proletarian. What does not vary is the necessity for him to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be in the midst of other people, and to be mortal there.

These limits are neither purely subjective nor purely objective. They have an objective side and a subjective side. Objective because they are found everywhere and are recognizable everywhere. Subjective because they are lived, and are nothing if man does not live them, that is, freely determine his existence with reference to them.

The consequence is that every configuration, however individual, has a universal value, and can be understood by anyone. Sartre puts it as a claim about comprehension across cultures and eras: there is always a way to understand the idiot, the child, the foreigner, provided one has the necessary information. So there is a universality of man, but it is not given, it is perpetually being made. I build the universal in choosing myself, and I build it in understanding the configuration of every other man.

That last sentence is the difference between condition and nature stated exactly. A nature is issued. A condition is a set of walls that everyone is inside and everyone deals with differently.

Worked example: applying the reversal to a case

The claim to apply: a person is the ensemble of his acts, and nothing else.

Take Sartre’s own case, which he raises as an objection to himself. A man says: circumstances have been against me, I have had no great love and no great friendship, but that is because I never met a man or a woman who was worthy. The books I have written have not been very good because I did not have the proper leisure. So there remains within me, unused and quite viable, a host of propensities, inclinations, possibilities, that one would not guess from the mere series of things I have done.

The existentialist answer is that the unused host does not exist. There is no love other than one which manifests itself in a person’s being in love. There is no genius other than one which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the sum of Proust’s works; the genius of Racine is his series of tragedies. Outside of that, there is nothing.

The obvious objection is that Racine could have written another tragedy. Sartre’s reply: he did not write it.

Two guards on this, both of which Sartre puts in himself, and both of which matter for a paper because the crude version is easy to attack.

It is not reduction to the artwork. Saying “you are nothing else than your life” does not imply that the artist is to be judged solely on the basis of his works of art. A thousand other things contribute toward summing him up. The claim is that a man is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up his undertakings.

It is defining positively, not negatively. The alternative is to define a man as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations. That is defining him negatively, by what did not happen. Sartre’s position is that reality alone is what counts.

The same structure applied to a moral case. The existentialist writes about a coward, and says the coward is responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that because he has a cowardly heart or lung or brain, and not on account of his physiological make-up. He is like that because he has made himself a coward by his acts. There is no such thing as a cowardly constitution. There are nervous constitutions; there is poor blood; there are strong constitutions. But the man whose blood is poor is not a coward on that account, because what makes cowardice is the act of renouncing or yielding. A constitution is not an act.

So the coward makes himself cowardly, and the hero makes himself heroic. There is always a possibility for the coward not to be cowardly any more and for the hero to stop being heroic. What counts is total involvement, and some one particular action or set of circumstances is not total involvement.

Vocabulary to deploy

• Existence precedes essence — “first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.”
• Essentialism — the view Sartre is against: “each man is a particular example of a universal concept, man.” He attributes it to Diderot, Voltaire, and Kant, who dropped God and kept human nature.
• The paper-cutter — the manufactured object whose “essence precedes existence,” and the artisan-God who makes men the same way. Sartre’s name for the underlying picture is “a technical view of the world.”
• “At first he is nothing” — “If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something.”
• “There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it” — the one-line derivation. A concept has to be a concept in some mind.
• Will is not the ground — a conscious decision “is subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves.” Deliberation is downstream of a more spontaneous choice.
• The two subjectivisms — that an individual makes himself, and that “it is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity.” The second is “the essential meaning of existentialism.”
• Choosing for all men — “in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.” Worked example: the Christian trade-union.
• Condition, not nature — “the a priori limits which outline man’s fundamental situation”: to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be among others, to be mortal. Objective because found everywhere, subjective because “they are nothing if man does not live them.”
• “Man is nothing else than the ensemble of his acts” — the positive definition. Against it: defining a man “negatively,” as “a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations.”
• Racine — “Why say that Racine could have written another tragedy, when he didn’t write it?” The proof that unused potential is not part of what you are.
• The coward — “there is no such thing as a cowardly constitution… what makes cowardice is the act of renouncing or yielding. A constitution is not an act.”