Jean-Paul Sartre

Key ideas

Sartre's slogan is that existence precedes essence. A paper knife is designed for a purpose before it is made, but human beings have no designer and no fixed nature. We exist first, and define ourselves through our choices. There is no excuse to hide behind: not God, not human nature, not our circumstances.

This freedom is a burden, and we constantly flee it in bad faith, pretending to be fixed things. His example is a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, playing at being a waiter as though he had no choice. Yet freedom always operates within facticity, the given facts of our situation.

In Being and Nothingness he also analysed the experience of being looked at by another person, which turns us into an object in their world, and argued that consciousness is defined by a kind of nothingness, its ability to step back from whatever is given.

Life, briefly

Sartre studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong partner. He was a prisoner of war in 1940–41 and wrote Being and Nothingness during the German occupation of Paris.

After the war he became the most famous intellectual in the world, writing novels, plays and political essays and co-founding the journal Les Temps modernes. He declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. About fifty thousand people followed his funeral procession.

Major works

• Nausea (1938)
• Being and Nothingness (1943)
• No Exit (1944)
• Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
• Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)

Schools of thought

Existentialism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Jean-Paul Sartre
• WikipediaJean-Paul Sartre