Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence

The Quote

"Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards" is Sartre's own gloss on his famous formula "existence precedes essence," from Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946). The formula is the founding thesis of existentialism.

Context

Sartre introduced the formula in his 1945 lecture L'existentialisme est un humanisme, delivered to a packed hall in Paris after the Liberation and published the following year. He illustrates it with the paper-knife: the artisan first conceives the knife's essence — its purpose and design — and then produces it, so that essence precedes existence. For the human being, by contrast, there is no artisan God and no fixed human nature: we exist first, with no pre-ordained definition, and we define ourselves afterwards, through what we do.

Meaning & Interpretation

The thesis has three consequences. Ontologically, there is no human essence that determines what we will be; each person is a project, a work in progress. Ethically, since we define ourselves, we cannot excuse ourselves by appealing to "human nature" — we are responsible for what we make of ourselves, and, in Sartre's stronger claim, for the image of humanity our choices offer to others. Existentially, the absence of a pre-given essence is the source of anguish and of freedom: there is no script, no guarantee, and no one to blame but ourselves. The formula is thus both a description of the human condition and a demand.

Legacy

"Existence precedes essence" became the slogan of French existentialism and one of the most quoted sentences in twentieth-century philosophy. It was developed by Simone de Beauvoir into the ethics of ambiguity, criticized by Heidegger as a metaphysical misunderstanding, and absorbed into the wider culture as the emblem of radical freedom and self-creation. It remains the standard entry point for understanding existentialist ethics and its insistence that we are, first and last, what we make of ourselves.

Sources

1. Crowell, S. (2020). "Existentialism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
2. Sartre, J.-P. (1946). Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. P. Mairet. Methuen.
3. Onof, C. J. (2020). "Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/
4. Flynn, T. (2013). Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.