QuestionsXIX
Are you born with a nature?
A knife is made for cutting before it exists. Sartre argued that people are the reverse: we exist first, and only then decide what we are.
- Reading time
- 4 min
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Branch
- Meaning
- First posed
- Jean-Paul Sartre, lecture 'Existentialism Is a Humanism', Paris, 1945
The question
Consider a paper knife, Jean-Paul Sartre said. Before it was made, the craftsman had an idea of it: what it was for and how it should be built. Its essence, what it is, came before its existence. If God made human beings, the same would be true of us: our nature would be fixed in advance, and we would simply be fulfilling it.
But Sartre, an atheist, drew the opposite conclusion. If there is no designer, there is no plan for humans. We are thrown into the world first, and only afterward, through our choices, do we become anything in particular. A human being is nothing other than what they make of themselves. Existence precedes essence.
This means you are, in Sartre's famous phrase, condemned to be free. You cannot hide behind your nature, your upbringing or your circumstances. Even refusing to choose is a choice. And in choosing for yourself, Sartre argued, you implicitly choose an image of what a human being should be.
Why it matters
The idea challenges every excuse of the form 'that's just who I am'. If there is no fixed self, you are responsible not only for what you do but for who you become.
It also stands against a long tradition, from Aristotle onward, that grounds ethics in human nature. If there is no human nature, ethics must be built on something else, such as freedom itself.
Key terms
- ExistentialismA movement holding that human beings have no fixed nature or given purpose, and must create meaning through free choices for which they are wholly responsible.
- Bad faithSartre's term for self-deception about our own freedom: pretending that we are fixed things, determined by roles or circumstances, in order to avoid responsibility for our choices.
- AuthenticityIn existentialism, living according to choices one recognises as one's own, rather than hiding behind roles, conventions or excuses.
- Human natureA set of traits, capacities or purposes that belong to all human beings as such. Existentialists deny there is a fixed one; Aristotle and many others build ethics on it.
- FacticityIn existentialism, the given facts of a person's situation that they did not choose: body, past, birthplace, the world around them. Freedom always operates within facticity.
The positions
Existence precedes essence
There is no fixed human nature. We make ourselves through our choices, and are wholly responsible for what we become.
There is a human nature
Humans have a nature, a set of capacities and needs that define what it is to live well as one of us.
Freedom within limits
We have a partial nature and a partial freedom. We are shaped by biology and culture, but can reflect on and revise what we have been given.
Arguments and objections
Existence precedes essence
- Best argument
- Without a creator, there is nothing to assign us a purpose. And experience bears this out: people reinvent themselves, overcome their pasts, and become what no one predicted. Pretending otherwise is what Sartre called bad faith, like the waiter who plays at being a waiter so completely that he denies his own freedom.
- Strongest objection
- Science tells us a great deal about human nature: our evolved emotions, our genetic predispositions, our shared cognitive biases. Identical twins raised apart show striking similarities. We are not blank slates who author ourselves from scratch.
- The reply
- Sartre accepted that we have facticity, given facts like our bodies, history and situation. His claim is that these do not settle what we make of them. A predisposition is not a destiny.
There is a human nature
- Best argument
- Aristotle argued that the good life for any creature depends on what kind of creature it is. Humans are rational and social, so we flourish by exercising reason and living well with others. Contemporary evolutionary psychology and neuroscience reinforce the point: human beings share deep, universal features.
- Strongest objection
- Claims about human nature have often been used to justify oppression, for example by declaring women naturally suited to domestic life. Simone de Beauvoir argued that 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman': much of what is called nature is social construction.
- The reply
- Natural law and virtue theorists answer that the abuse of an idea does not refute it, and that a correct account of human nature, one that includes our capacity for reason and freedom, would condemn oppression.
Freedom within limits
- Best argument
- This middle view, held in various forms by many philosophers today, keeps what is right in both: we are not infinitely plastic, but we are not fixed either. Our capacity to reflect on our desires and change them is itself part of our nature.
- Strongest objection
- Each side says the middle view concedes too much to the other. Sartre would say it is a recipe for excuses; naturalists would say it overrates how much we can change.
Who argued what
- Existence precedes essence Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
- There is a human nature Aristotle, Philippa Foot, Steven Pinker
- Freedom within limits Simone de Beauvoir, Charles Taylor
Variations
Sartre's student
During the German occupation of France, one of Sartre's students asked him for advice. Should he leave to join the Free French forces, or stay to care for his mother, whose only consolation he was? Sartre's answer was that the student was free and must choose, which is to say, invent. No moral theory could decide it for him. Critics found the answer unhelpful; Sartre thought it was the only honest one.
Go deeper
Bad faith
Sartre's examples of bad faith include a woman on a date who leaves her hand in her companion's as if it were merely an object, avoiding the decision about what it means; and a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too much the waiter. In each case, a person flees their own freedom by pretending to be a thing with a fixed nature. Bad faith is a form of self-deception, and Sartre thought it was the most common human condition.
Schools of thought: Existentialism
Related ideas
Further reading and sources
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Existentialism
- WikipediaExistence precedes essence
- BookExistentialism Is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre
- BookThe Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
- BookAt the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell
Open questions
- Which parts of you were given, and which did you choose?
- Is 'that's just who I am' ever a good excuse?
- If you invent your values, can you be wrong about them?