A paper-knife is made according to a concept — its essence comes before its existence. If God created humans, we would be like that. But if there is no God, there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence: man. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism.
Heidegger rejected the formula as merely reversing Platonic metaphysics; feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir drew from it — “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Sententiae
phrases in the originalL'existence précède l'essence
Origin. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945). — Jean-Paul Sartre
The motto of existentialism.
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related by shared connectionsExistentialism Is a Humanism
Sartre’s 1945 public lecture — the most popular statement of existentialism — existence precedes essence, man is condemned to be free.
Bad Faith
Self-deception about one’s own freedom — pretending to be a thing, determined by role or nature, to escape the anguish of choice.
Mokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.
Āṇṭāḷ
The only woman among the twelve Tamil Āḻvār saints (9th century) — a girl who wore the garland meant for Viṣṇu, refused any human husband, and wrote the Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi, poems of longing for God as her bridegroom.
Sartre vs. Camus
The most famous intellectual break of the twentieth century — two friends of the Resistance fall out in 1952 over revolution, violence, and The Rebel.
Simone de Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex (1949) — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — founded modern feminist philosophy, and whose ethics of ambiguity argued that my freedom requires the freedom of others.