Existentialism: Sartre, Freedom, and Bad Faith

A Lecture That Changed Continental Philosophy

On October 29, 1945 — barely one year after the liberation of Paris — Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a lecture at the Club Maintenant titled "Existentialism Is a Humanism." The hall was so packed that attendees fainted from the heat; people stood on chairs. France was rebuilding its identity after occupation and collaboration, and existentialism offered something specific: a philosophy that located the source of meaning and moral responsibility squarely in the individual, not in God, nature, or social role. The lecture was transcribed and published; it remains the most accessible entry point to Sartrean existentialism, though Sartre later partially disavowed it as oversimplified.

Sartre's Intellectual Formation

Sartre (1905–1980) studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and spent 1933–1934 in Berlin studying Husserl's phenomenology. His major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), written in occupied Paris, is 722 pages of dense phenomenological ontology. It established the conceptual architecture that "Existentialism Is a Humanism" popularized: the distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the analysis of bad faith, and the radical account of freedom.

Existence Precedes Essence

The slogan "existence precedes essence" is the center of Sartrean existentialism. To understand it requires its contrast: "essence precedes existence." A paper knife, Sartre argues, has its essence — its purpose, its concept — before any individual knife exists: the artisan conceives the knife before making it. In traditional theism, the same is true of humans: God conceives a human nature before creating any particular human. Humans have an essence — a purpose, a nature — that precedes their individual existence.

Sartre rejects this. There is no God; there is therefore no prior concept of human nature. A human being exists first — is "thrown" into the world — and only afterward defines what they are through their choices. The human being is what it makes of itself. Nothing — not biology, not social role, not psychology — fixes in advance what a person is or ought to be.

This is exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. Sartre describes the recognition of this condition as "anguish": the vertigo of total freedom, the realization that one cannot escape responsibility for one's choices by appealing to nature, God, or determinism.

Bad Faith (Mauvaise Foi)

Bad faith is Sartre's most clinically precise concept. It describes the distinctly human capacity to deceive oneself about one's freedom — to pretend one is a thing rather than a consciousness, to act as if one's choices are determined rather than free.

His examples are famous. The waiter who performs the waiter role with excessive precision — moving with mechanical fluency, voice slightly too formal — is in bad faith. He is pretending to be a waiter the way a stone is a stone: essentially, necessarily, with no gap between role and being. But a human being is never entirely their role. The waiter is always also free to quit, to rebel, to be something other than a waiter. Denying this is bad faith.

• The woman on a date who allows a man to hold her hand while pretending not to notice — treating her own hand as a disconnected object — is in bad faith about her freedom to accept or reject him
• A person who says "I can't help being jealous — it's just my temperament" is in bad faith, treating a psychological tendency as if it were a fixed essence rather than a pattern that freedom can interrupt
• Bad faith is not lying to others; it is self-deception — which Sartre finds philosophically puzzling, since the deceiver and deceived are the same person
• Sartre's resolution: human consciousness is always split between being-for-itself (the reflective subject, always slightly ahead of any fixed identity) and the self it tries to define itself as

Radical Freedom and Responsibility

Sartre's claim is stark: humans are "condemned to be free." There is no escape from choice. Even refusing to choose is a choice. This freedom is total — which means responsibility is also total. In "Existentialism Is a Humanism," he argues that in choosing for oneself, one implicitly chooses a model for humanity: "In choosing myself, I choose man."

This absolute responsibility is why Sartre rejects deterministic excuses — psychological, sociological, neurological — for one's actions. This aspect of Sartre's existentialism has been extensively criticized in the light of contemporary neuroscience and social determinism research, which documents how little conscious choice shapes much behavior.

• Sartre's 1945 lecture drew 2,500 attendees to a venue with 500 seats; many fainted, chairs were broken, the event became a cultural spectacle
• Being and Nothingness (1943) was written under Nazi occupation; French censors allowed philosophical works through with less scrutiny than political texts
• Sartre declined the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature — the only person to voluntarily refuse it — saying he did not wish to be institutionalized by a bourgeois honor
• He later became involved in Marxism and argued in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) that existentialism must be situated within the constraints of material history

Simone de Beauvoir's Feminist Extension

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) — Sartre's lifelong intellectual companion and partner — applied existentialist concepts to the situation of women in The Second Sex (1949). Her famous opening claim: "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman." This is pure existentialism applied to gender: womanhood is not a biological essence but a social construction that women are pressured to inhabit in bad faith.

De Beauvoir's contribution goes beyond application. She criticized Sartre's account for ignoring how situation — the material, social, historical conditions one inhabits — constrains freedom. An enslaved person and a free person are both "free" in Sartre's metaphysical sense, but their situations differ radically in the real options available to them. De Beauvoir insisted that philosophy of freedom must engage with the concrete conditions that expand or contract the exercise of that freedom.

De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) is now recognized as a foundational text of existentialist ethics in its own right, not merely a supplement to Sartre. Together, their work shaped not only continental philosophy but second-wave feminism, postcolonial theory, and the philosophy of oppression.