Existence Before Essence

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sartre's shorthand for existentialism is a single sentence: existence precedes essence. A paper knife has an essence before it exists, because someone designed it for a purpose first and only then made the object. A human being, Sartre argued, has no designer and so no purpose given in advance; a person simply exists, and only afterward, through choices that can always have been otherwise, becomes whatever they become. The freedom this leaves behind is not the light thing it sounds like. Sartre named its opposite bad faith, the everyday trick of pretending to be a fixed thing rather than a free consciousness, because a role is easier to live inside than a freedom with no excuse. His example is a Paris cafe waiter whose motions are a little too precise, a little too much like a waiter, as though playing the part completely could make the choice to keep playing it disappear. It cannot. For Sartre, the waiter remains free to stand up and walk out at any moment, and bad faith is the name for every way people convince themselves otherwise.