Condemned to be free: Sartre's existentialism

Change jobs or stay. Who to live with. What to do with my life. Sometimes I think it would be so much easier if someone just told me the right answer.

On October 29, 1945, in Paris, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre gave a lecture called "Existentialism Is a Humanism." Published as a book the following year, it became one of the texts that carried existentialism around the world [1].

What Sartre talked about was exactly this situation: nobody is going to tell you the right answer.

A paper knife has a purpose

Sartre uses the example of a paper knife, the small blade for opening letters.

The craftsman who makes it first has in mind what it's for, cutting paper, and how to make it. Only then does he make it. Before the knife exists, what it is for is already decided. That is the knife's "essence" [1].

If people were made by a God with a purpose in mind, we would be like the knife. How we should live would be settled before we were born.

Existence precedes essence

But Sartre held that no one designed human beings in advance. If so, the order flips.

A person exists first. Thrown into the world with no purpose and no blueprint. Only afterward, through their own choices, do they make what they will become [1].

"I'm this kind of person" is not fixed from the start. In "What kind of person do you want to be?" I wrote about deciding who you want to be before deciding what to do. I think that's close to this.

Why is freedom a "sentence"?

So far it sounds hopeful. You can become anything.

But Sartre said that man is "condemned to be free" [1]. We didn't create ourselves, yet once we're thrown into the world, we're responsible for everything we do.

And we can't not choose. Hesitating and doing nothing is also a choice. There's no "essence" to use as an excuse, so there's no escaping your own choices. That's what the sentence means.

"You are free. Choose."

In the lecture, Sartre tells the story of one of his students [1].

During the war, the young man's older brother had been killed in the German offensive. He wanted to go to England, join the Free French Forces, and avenge his brother. But that would mean leaving his mother, who was living for him alone. He came to Sartre to ask what he should do.

Sartre's answer:

It sounds cold. But no moral teaching tells you in advance which of the two is right. And by choosing whom to ask for advice, the student had already half chosen the answer he wanted.

What you choose becomes you

In "I want freedom, not love," I wrote that what I really want is freedom. Reading Sartre, I can see that freedom is not light.

Freedom doesn't mean you can do whatever you like. It means you can't blame anyone else for what you chose.

Still, I'd rather carry that weight. Rather than live a right answer someone else decided, I'd rather take the answer I chose and make it right afterward.