Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre

Consider a paper-knife. Before it ever exists, there is a concept of it in the mind of its maker, a plan, a purpose, a definition of what a paper-knife is for. Its essence comes first; its existence follows. For most of Western history, Jean-Paul Sartre observed, we thought of human beings the same way: as made by God according to a plan, each of us stamped with a built-in nature and purpose, an essence that existed before we were born and told us what we were. But suppose, Sartre said, taking the absence of God with a seriousness few could match, that there is no maker, no plan, no human nature waiting in any divine mind. Then everything is reversed. For us, and us alone, existence precedes essence. We turn up in the world first, thrown into it without instructions, with no nature, no purpose, no blueprint of what we are supposed to be, and only afterward, by the choices we make and the things we do, do we slowly make ourselves into something. A human being, Sartre wrote, is nothing else but what he makes of himself. There is no excuse, no given self to fall back on, no "that is simply my nature." You arrive as a question, not an answer, and you spend your life answering it, with every choice you make. It is the most exhilarating and the most terrifying idea in modern philosophy: that you are not discovered but invented, and that the inventor is you.

The freedom of a nothingness. What is it about us, Sartre asked, that makes us free in a way that rocks and trees and tables are not? His answer lies in the strange nature of consciousness. A thing, a stone, simply is what it is, solid, full, identical with itself, packed tight with its own being. Consciousness is the opposite: it is never simply what it is, because it can always stand back from what is, hold it at a distance, question it, negate it, imagine it otherwise. When you are bored in a room, you are aware of the room as what it is not; you picture the elsewhere you would rather be. Consciousness is shot through with this power of negation, of saying "no," of introducing a little nothingness, a gap, into the dense fullness of the world. Sartre called consciousness a "hole in being," a kind of nothingness lodged in the midst of things, and this, exactly this, is the source of our freedom. Because I am not welded to what is, because I can always negate my situation and imagine an alternative, I am never wholly trapped by the given; I can always, in principle, choose against it. A stone cannot refuse to be a stone. But a human being can always refuse, can always say no, can always tear free of what is toward what might be, and that gap of nothingness, that inner distance from the world and even from our own past, is the very thing we mean by freedom. We are free because we are, in part, a kind of No.

Condemned to be free. If we have no fixed nature, then nothing decides our choices for us, and Sartre drew the full, vertiginous conclusion: we are radically, totally free, and there is no escaping it. This is not the cheerful freedom of a holiday brochure. Sartre called it being "condemned to be free," because we did not choose to be free, we simply find ourselves so, with no ground beneath us and no rulebook to consult, forced to choose and choose and choose, every moment, with no way to stop. Even refusing to decide is a decision; even drifting is a choice to drift. And because nothing outside us authorizes our choices, no God, no human nature, no objective values written into the universe, we are utterly responsible for them. There is no one else to blame, no excuse that holds. You cannot say "I had to," because you did not have to; you cannot say "it is just how I am," because you are making yourself how you are, right now, by accepting it. This total responsibility is the source of the anguish Sartre put at the center of human life, not a neurotic worry but the honest dizziness of realizing that the entire weight of your existence rests on your own choosing shoulders, and that you can never set it down. Most of us find this unbearable, and spend enormous energy pretending it is not so.

The lies we tell ourselves. Here Sartre named the thing that may be his most useful gift to anyone trying to live honestly: bad faith, the endless, ingenious self-deceptions by which we flee from our own freedom. Because freedom is frightening, Sartre saw, we are forever tempted to pretend we do not have it, to disguise our choices as facts about our fixed nature, to act as though we were things, with a settled essence, rather than free beings who could always do otherwise. His famous example is a café waiter, a little too eager, a little too precise, exaggeratedly performing his role, who has so thrown himself into being a waiter that he has hidden from himself the truth that he is a free person merely choosing, this morning, to wait tables, and could choose otherwise. We do this constantly. "I had no choice," we say, when we did. "That's just the way I am," we say, as though our character were a finished object and not a running project we renew with every act. "I couldn't help it." "My upbringing made me this way." Each of these, Sartre argues, is a small lie we tell to escape the anguish of responsibility, a way of pretending to be a stone when we are in fact a freedom. And once you have grasped the idea, you cannot stop noticing it, in others and, more uncomfortably, in yourself, every time you reach for the excuse that you are simply, helplessly, the way you are. Bad faith is one of philosophy's sharpest tools for self-honesty: a lie detector aimed at the lies we most want to believe.

Under the eyes of others. But we are not alone in the world, and Sartre's account of other people is one of the most penetrating, and most misunderstood, parts of his work. Picture yourself, he says, crouched at a keyhole, absorbed in spying, wholly a free subject pursuing your curiosity. Then suddenly you hear a footstep behind you: someone is watching. In that instant everything changes. Under the other's gaze you are no longer a free subject but an object, a thing being seen, fixed and judged, "a peeping Tom," caught and labeled from the outside. This is "the look," and Sartre saw in it the fundamental structure of our life with others: each of us is both a free subject for ourselves and an object for everyone else, and we are forever caught between living our own freedom and being pinned down by how others see us. It is from this analysis that his most quoted line comes, the closing words of his play No Exit, "hell is other people," which is almost universally misread as plain misanthropy. Sartre meant something subtler and sadder: that we are tormented because we cannot help seeing ourselves through other people's eyes, letting their judgments define us, becoming objects in their gaze and losing ourselves in their estimation. Hell is not that other people are cruel; it is that we hand them the power to tell us what we are, and so betray our own freedom to the verdict of the crowd.

What will you make of yourself? The room reads Sartre from the wider record, since his work remains under copyright, and the chat says so. He was the most public of philosophers, a small, wall-eyed, chain-smoking man who became a global celebrity, a fixture of the Paris cafés where he wrote, a playwright and novelist as well as a philosopher, who threw himself into the political struggles of his age and, at the height of his fame, refused the Nobel Prize because he would not be turned into an institution. He did not work alone: his lifelong partnership with Simone de Beauvoir, intellectual equals who never married and never stopped arguing philosophy, was one of the great collaborations of the century, and it was Beauvoir who took the existentialist idea, that one is not born but rather becomes, and turned it into the foundation of modern feminism. Sartre's later years carried his philosophy of freedom toward politics and a complicated engagement with Marxism, in search of a way to honor both individual freedom and collective liberation. Fashions turned against him; the structuralists who followed declared the free, self-making subject an illusion, and for a time he seemed dated. But the core of him does not date, because it speaks to a permanent human predicament. Strip away the period costume, and Sartre is asking each of us the question we most want to avoid: given that no God and no nature will do it for you, given that you are free and that your excuses are lies, what are you going to make of yourself? You are, he insists, the sum of your actions and nothing else, the author of a book you are writing as you live it, with no one to blame and no one to thank but yourself. It is a hard freedom. It is also, he thought, the only honest one.