Existentialism & the Absurd Part 3: Jean-Paul Sartre — Radical Freedom & Bad Faith

Sartre in Context

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was the public face of 20th-century existentialism. Philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, political activist, and, in his own description, "a man who writes" — Sartre dominated French intellectual life from the end of the Second World War until his death. He famously refused the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, on the grounds that no writer should let himself be transformed into an institution.

His life partner Simone de Beauvoir was his philosophical equal and frequent challenger; we will meet her in Part 6. Together they built what they called a "morganatic marriage" — a relationship of unconditional intellectual loyalty without legal or sexual exclusivity. Their café (the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés) became the de facto headquarters of postwar French thought.

Paris, War, Resistance

Sartre's philosophy did not develop in a study. He drafted parts of Being and Nothingness (1943) — his vast 700-page magnum opus — while a prisoner of war in a German camp, and continued writing during the Nazi occupation of Paris. He worked, modestly, for the Resistance. The experience of occupation, where every small daily act was a political choice, gave concrete weight to his abstract claim that we are always free, even in chains.

Existentialism is a Humanism (1945)

In October 1945, Sartre delivered a public lecture in Paris titled L'existentialisme est un humanisme. The hall was so overcrowded that women fainted; he reportedly had to fight his way through the crowd to reach the podium. The lecture, transcribed and published the following year, became the most accessible — and most controversial — statement of his philosophy.

Sartre later expressed regret about it; he thought it oversimplified Being and Nothingness for a popular audience. But it remains the best gateway to his thought, and the source of his most-quoted lines.

Existence Precedes Essence

This is the core slogan of Sartrean existentialism. Like all great slogans it is initially obscure, and turns out to do a lot of work.

The Paper-Knife and the Human

Consider, Sartre says, an artisan making a paper-knife. Before the knife exists, the artisan has a concept of it: its purpose (to slit envelopes), its shape, its material. The essence of the paper-knife — what it is, what it is for — exists before any actual paper-knife. The artisan then makes a knife according to that essence. For manufactured objects, essence precedes existence.

The classical Western tradition treated humans the same way. God is the cosmic artisan. Before he created you, He had a concept of "human nature" — your purpose, your function, your moral telos. Your job was to fulfill the essence already designed for you. Even Enlightenment philosophers who dropped God kept the structure: there was still a "human nature" — rational, moral, social — that defined what you should become.

Sartre, an atheist, refuses this. If there is no God, there is no cosmic artisan, no pre-given human essence. Therefore:

What Follows From This

If existence precedes essence, then a series of unsettling things follow:

• You have no excuses. You cannot say "I am this way because of my nature" — there is no nature. You are what your choices, summed up across a life, have made you.
• You are responsible for everyone. Every choice you make implicitly proposes a model of how a human being should be. To choose for yourself is to legislate, in a small way, for humanity.
• You are in anguish. The realization that you alone, without external sanction, are choosing the meaning of your life is vertiginous. (This is Kierkegaard's anxiety in atheist dress.)
• You are in forlornness. There is no God to consult, no value-system pre-installed. You are alone with your decisions.
• You live in despair — but a working despair, the discipline of acting only on what is in your power and not relying on miracles.

Being-In-Itself & Being-For-Itself

To make sense of bad faith and freedom, we need a quick tour of the metaphysics from Being and Nothingness.

Two Modes of Being

Consciousness as Nothingness

Sartre's most striking claim is that consciousness is, structurally, a nothingness at the heart of being. It is not a thing among things. It is the gap — the "fissure" — through which non-being enters the world. To ask a question, to expect, to negate, to imagine an absent friend in the café — all these acts presuppose a being that can hold the world at a distance and consider it as not yet.

This is why human freedom is total. There is no fixed human "nature" weighing the for-itself down toward determinism, because there is no thing in there at all to be determined. You are not a self the way a rock is a rock. You are a process of constantly choosing — even when you refuse to choose, you are choosing to refuse.

Bad Faith (Mauvaise Foi)

If we are radically free, why don't we feel it most of the time? Sartre's answer is bad faith — the systematic, self-deceiving flight from our own freedom. Bad faith is not ordinary lying (lying to others); it is the much stranger project of lying to oneself. The liar in good faith knows the truth she is hiding. The bad-faith subject must, in some sense, both know and not know the truth at once. This impossibility is what makes consciousness, on Sartre's view, the only being capable of bad faith.

The Parisian Waiter

The Woman on the Date

Another famous example: a woman on a first date. The man takes her hand. She knows he wants more, but she is not ready to decide. So she leaves her hand in his — and pretends, to herself, that the hand is just a thing, an object, that she doesn't notice. She makes herself all transcendence (an intellect floating above the table, discussing poetry) and treats her own body as all facticity (a passive thing, irrelevant to her real self).

Bad faith, Sartre says, almost always works by treating one of the two poles of human existence as if it were the whole truth. We are always both facticity (the given: body, history, situation) and transcendence (the going-beyond: project, freedom, future). To collapse into either pole is bad faith.

Anguish, Forlornness, Despair

Bad faith is, in part, a flight from three painful affective dimensions of freedom Sartre names in his lecture:

• Anguish (angoisse) — the feeling that arises when I realize the choice is mine alone, with no external arbiter. The general who orders an attack, the parent who sets a curfew, the artist who picks one career over another, all feel this when they take it seriously.
• Forlornness (délaissement) — the felt absence of a moral universe pre-stocked with values. Sartre tells of a student during the war who came to him torn between joining the Free French and staying with his ailing mother. No ethical theory could decide for him. Sartre's only advice: "You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent."
• Despair (désespoir) — the disciplined refusal to count on what is outside my power. I cannot count on the world cooperating; I can only commit to what I can will and act on, here and now.

The Look (Le Regard) & Authenticity

So far we have a single consciousness wrestling with itself. But humans are not solitary. The other person — equally a free for-itself — bursts onto the scene, and changes everything.

The Keyhole Scene

Hell is Other People

Sartre's play No Exit (Huis clos, 1944) dramatizes this. Three dead characters discover they are in hell — but the hell is just a drawing room with no mirrors, where each must see themselves only through the eyes of the other two. The famous closing line — "L'enfer, c'est les autres," Hell is other people — has been almost universally misunderstood.

Sartre clarified: he did not mean that other people are intrinsically bad, or that human relations are necessarily torture. He meant that when our relations with others are corrupted, the others' look becomes a hellish constraint we cannot escape. The play's three characters are damned because they refuse to take responsibility for the freedom each still has — they let the others' image of them be the truth of who they are. That is hell. It is also bad faith.

Toward Authenticity

Sartre never wrote the systematic ethics he repeatedly promised, but the implicit ideal that runs through his work is authenticity: a way of living that fully owns one's freedom, refuses bad faith, and acknowledges the equal freedom of others.

Authenticity is not a state you achieve once and keep. It is a constant practice. Each new situation tempts a new bad-faith escape; each demands again the lucid acknowledgment "this is mine to choose." Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), develops this further: my freedom is only authentic if I will the freedom of others as the condition of my own. We will return to this in Parts 6 and 7.