Existence Precedes Essence
For a paper cutter, the design comes before the object. Sartre argues that for human beings, there is no design. You exist first. The rest is up to you.
Five sections. The first is open. Read them in order — the argument builds.
Sartre opens with a thought experiment that is deceptively simple. Consider a paper cutter — a small blade for opening envelopes or cutting paper. Before the artisan who made it picked up the metal, they had a concept of what they were making: what the object was for, what shape it needed to be, how it would work. The design, the function, the purpose — all of this existed in the mind of the maker before the object existed in the world.
In philosophical terms: the essence (what it is, what it’s for) preceded the existence (the fact that there is one). The made object has a nature that was fixed before it existed. That nature is not its fault, so to speak — it was imposed from outside, by a mind that designed it with a purpose.
Now consider the traditional religious picture of human beings. If God created you — if there is a divine artisan who had in mind what a human being is supposed to be, what function we are to serve, what kind of creatures we are — then the same structure applies. Essence (your nature, your purpose, your place in the divine plan) precedes existence (the particular life you are living). On this view, to live well is to live in accordance with a nature that was given to you, that you did not choose.
Sartre thinks this picture was abandoned by most educated people long before the twentieth century. But he notices something: even atheists often kept the structure while dropping the deity. Eighteenth-century atheists, he argues, eliminated God but retained the idea of a fixed human nature — a universal human essence defined by reason, or feeling, or sociality, or whatever else. They kept essence-before-existence without the theism that originally justified it.
Sartre’s move is to reject the structure entirely, not just the deity. If there is no God, then there is no divine artisan who designed you. And if there is no designer, there is no design. Which means: you exist first, and whatever essence you have — whatever you become — is something you make, not something you were given. Existence precedes essence.
Two kinds of being
To understand why existence precedes essence for human beings, you need Sartre’s most fundamental distinction, which comes from Being and Nothingness and underpins everything in the lecture.
Sartre distinguishes two fundamental modes of being:
| Mode of Being | French / Technical Term | Examples | Key Feature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Being-in-itself (en-soi) | Things, objects | Rock, chair, paper cutter, tree | Is what it is; fully self-identical; no possibility, no lack |
| Being-for-itself (pour-soi) | Consciousness | Human beings | Is never simply what it is; always ahead of itself; characterized by lack and possibility |
The rock just is. It does not wonder what it is. It has no projects. It does not feel anxiety about whether it is living up to its potential. It is simply, fully, and completely itself — not a rock-in-progress, not a rock-that-could-be-different. Its being is solid, dense, complete.
Consciousness is different. When you are aware of something, you are not identical with that something — you are always at a distance from it, relating to it, interpreting it. And crucially, when you are aware of yourself, there is always a gap between the self that is aware and the self that is being observed. You are never simply identical with yourself the way a rock is identical with itself. You are always “not yet” something, always in the process of becoming, always ahead of yourself in your projects and behind yourself in your situation.
This is what Sartre means when he says consciousness is “nothing” — not that it doesn’t exist, but that it has no fixed, solid being of its own. It is pure activity, pure relating-to. It is defined not by what it is but by what it is not (the rock it is perceiving, the past self it has moved beyond, the future self it is projecting toward). This ontological structure — the nothingness at the heart of consciousness — is why freedom is not a gift we happen to have, but the very structure of our being.
The phrase “existence precedes essence” sounds abstract. What it means, practically, is that there is no fixed template that specifies what a human being should be. You are not born with a function. You are not born with a destiny. You are not even born with a character in any deep sense — you have temperament, you have a history, you have a situation, but none of these determine what you will make of yourself.
This sounds liberating. But Sartre insists on a harder version of it than most people find comfortable. Freedom, for him, is not something you have in addition to your situation — it is not a small zone of choice within a largely determined life. It is total. Even when you feel you have no choice, Sartre argues, you are choosing: choosing to accept the situation as you have described it, choosing not to resist, choosing to prioritize some things over others. The prisoner in a cell is not free to walk out. But how she lives her imprisonment, what she makes of it, what attitude she takes, what she chooses to think and value — these are not determined.
Sartre pushes this to an uncomfortable limit with an example from the lecture: a student who came to him during the war. The student’s brother had been killed. His mother was living with him, her only remaining son. He wanted to join the Free French Forces in England and fight. But if he left, his mother might not survive without him. Two moral demands, directly in conflict. No general moral principle settled the question — not patriotism (“serve your country”), not family duty (“care for your mother”). Both were genuine values. Sartre’s point: in choosing which value to act on, you are defining which kind of value matters most to you. There is no external principle that settles this for you. You are the author of your own ethical priorities, whether you acknowledge it or not.
△ Important distinction
Sartre’s “radical freedom” does not mean you can do anything. You cannot fly. You cannot change the family you were born into. You cannot undo the past. These are what he calls facticity — the given, unchosen facts of your situation. But how you take up your facticity — what you make of it, how you respond to it — this is where freedom operates. The point is not that external constraints are fake. It is that your response to them is always a choice.
Another way to put it: Sartre does not think you can avoid choosing. Not choosing is a choice. Letting things happen, going along with the crowd, doing what your class or country expects — these are not the absence of choice. They are choices you are making while pretending you are not making them. And pretending you are not making a choice when you are — that is bad faith.
The weight of freedom
If you are the source of your own values — if there is no external standard you are conforming to when you make your choices — then you bear total responsibility for what you choose. You cannot plead human nature (“I am just built this way”), historical forces (“my class shaped me”), or God (“it was his will”). All of these are ways of passing the buck to something outside yourself. Sartre will not allow it.
He adds a further layer that may seem strange at first: when you choose for yourself, you are choosing for all of humanity. Not in the sense that you are deciding what everyone must do — Sartre explicitly denies that. But in this sense: when you act, you are implicitly affirming that the kind of action you are taking is one a human being in your situation can take. You are proposing it, by your action, as a live option for anyone. A person who marries is saying, in effect, that marriage is worth committing to. A person who lies to protect themselves is saying that self-protection can justify deception.
Sartre is not saying you are legislating for others — he is saying that the universalizing structure of action means you cannot pretend your choices are purely private. When you act, you are creating a kind of image of what a human being does. This is why freedom carries the weight he says it does: you are not just deciding about your own life. You are deciding about what it can mean to be a person.
This argument echoes Kant’s categorical imperative — “Act only according to the maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” — but Sartre arrives at it from a completely different starting point, without Kant’s rationalist foundations. The similarity is worth noting; so is the difference.
What to look for as you read
Sartre’s lecture has a clear structure. The first half (up to the section on anguish, abandonment, and despair) covers the ground this page has described. As you read, notice:
The two charges Sartre is responding to. He names them at the start: the charge from communists that existentialism is too individualist, and the charge from Catholics that it is too pessimistic and morally corrosive. His whole argument is partly a reply to these. Notice how he returns to them throughout.
The paper cutter passage. It is short — maybe three paragraphs — but it is the fulcrum of everything. Make sure you understand why the cutter is useful as an example before moving on.
The distinction between the two kinds of existentialist. Sartre acknowledges that he is not the only existentialist. What does he say theistic and atheistic existentialists share? Where do they part company?
The student’s dilemma. Sartre describes a student who came to him for advice during the war. This is his most concrete illustration of the claim that moral principles cannot settle hard cases — only choice can. What conclusion does he draw from it?
The “choosing for all” passage. Sartre says that when we choose for ourselves, we choose for all. This is a philosophically loaded claim. Does he argue for it, or does he assert it? What does it mean for his overall position?