Sartre

01 · The question

Sartre argued that consciousness is not a thing with fixed properties but a lack that projects toward possibility, so that a human being is what it makes of itself. Existence precedes essence. The formula is easier to quote than to hold. If no fixed human nature is available to appeal to, then every appeal to what you simply are, by temperament, upbringing or circumstance, becomes a way of declining responsibility for a choice you are still making. Sartre calls that bad faith, and he takes it to be the ordinary condition rather than the exception.

02 · Freedom and bad faith

Because there is no given nature, we are, in his phrase, condemned to be free, and responsible even for our refusals. Bad faith is the self-deception of treating a chosen role as an unalterable fact — the waiter who is only a waiter, the coward who calls himself constituted that way. Sartre’s freedom is severe because even passivity becomes a stance. The claim is not that obstacles are imaginary, but that consciousness is never identical with the facts that limit it.

03 · Others

The look of another person turns me into an object in their world, which is why Sartre calls conflict the original meaning of being-for-others. De Beauvoir pressed further: freedom is situated, and structures of oppression distribute it unequally. The presence of others is not an afterthought. Shame, pride, desire and conflict reveal that selfhood is exposed; de Beauvoir turns that exposure into an analysis of oppression and mutual freedom.

04 · Where it leads

Sartre’s later work tried to reconcile this freedom with Marxist history, and his political engagements — praised and criticised — were an attempt to live the theory in public. The attempt exposed the hardest problem in the position. A philosophy built on radical individual freedom has trouble accounting for the ways class, poverty and history genuinely narrow what a person can choose. Whether the later work solves that or changes the subject is one of the standing disputes about him.