Existence Precedes Essence

Historical Context

Jean-Paul Sartre delivered the lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" (L'Existentialisme est un humanisme) at Club Maintenant in Paris in October 1945, shortly after the liberation of France. The lecture was published as a short book in 1946 and became the most widely read introduction to existentialist thought. Sartre wrote it not as a systematic philosophical treatise but as a public defense of existentialism against the accusations leveled by both Marxist critics, who charged it with bourgeois individualism and quietist despair, and Catholic critics, who accused it of nihilism and a denial of human dignity. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the lecture's enormous popular success also drew criticism from Sartre's philosophical peers, including Martin Heidegger, who distanced himself from the humanist framing in his Letter on Humanism (1947).

The phrase "existence precedes essence" was not invented for the lecture. Sartre had already developed the idea in his major philosophical work Being and Nothingness (1943), where he argued that human reality (pour-soi, the for-itself) is characterized by a radical freedom that distinguishes it from inert objects (en-soi, the in-itself). But the 1946 lecture gave the idea its most concise and accessible formulation, and it is through this text that the phrase entered the broader intellectual culture of the twentieth century. The context of post-war France was significant: the experience of occupation, resistance, and collaboration had made questions of individual responsibility and the absence of pre-given moral certainties painfully concrete, and Sartre's insistence that human beings must choose what they are resonated with a generation confronting the ruins of received values.

Meaning

The statement "existence precedes essence" means that a human being first exists, encounters themselves, and emerges in the world, and only afterward defines themselves. For Sartre, this is what distinguishes human beings from artifacts. He illustrates the point with the example of a paper knife (a letter opener). When an artisan makes a paper knife, they have a concept of what it is for, how it should look, and what properties it must have. The essence of the paper knife — its purpose and design — exists in the maker's mind before the object itself is manufactured. The paper knife's essence precedes its existence. Sartre argues that if God created human beings in the way an artisan creates a tool, then the traditional religious view would hold: God conceived of human nature, and then human beings were brought into existence to fulfill that conception, and in that case essence would precede existence.

But Sartre, as an atheist existentialist, denies that there is a divine artificer who designed human nature. Without a God to conceive of human essence before creating human beings, there is no pre-given human nature. Human beings simply arrive in the world first — they exist — and then they must determine what they are through their own choices and actions. There is no blueprint, no divine plan, no biological or social destiny that determines what a person must become. A person is nothing other than what they make of themselves. This also extends to moral values: if there is no God to decree what is good, then human beings must create their own values through free choice, and there is no external authority that can guarantee the rightness of those choices.

Philosophical Interpretation

The claim that existence precedes essence is the foundation of Sartre's entire existentialist philosophy, and its implications are radical. If human beings have no pre-defined nature, then they are radically free — not free in the comfortable sense of having options among which to choose, but free in the vertiginous sense of being condemned to choose. Every person must decide, in every moment, what they will be, and even the refusal to choose is itself a choice. Sartre describes this as being "condemned to be free," because freedom is not a gift but an inescapable burden. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that this conception of freedom eliminates the possibility of determinism, excuses, and appeals to human nature: one cannot say "I am this way because I was made this way," because there is no maker and no nature that predetermines what one is.

The second major implication is radical responsibility. If existence precedes essence, then each individual is fully responsible for what they are. But the responsibility extends further: in choosing for oneself, one also chooses for all humanity, because in choosing any action one implicitly affirms the value of that action as a way of being human. When a person chooses to marry, they affirm the value of monogamy for all human beings; when they choose a vocation, they affirm that this work is worth doing. This universalizing move, which Sartre borrows from Kant but gives an existentialist inflection, means that individual choices carry the weight of a declaration about what human life should be. The result is a moral philosophy without fixed rules: there are no a priori moral principles that can be applied to situations, because values themselves must be created through choice. The only bad faith (mauvaise foi) is the attempt to escape this responsibility by pretending that one's nature, role, or circumstances have already determined what one must do — by acting as though essence precedes existence when it does not. Authenticity, for Sartre, is the honest acceptance of one's radical freedom and the responsibility it entails, living without the comforting fiction that one is a thing rather than a consciousness.