Key Ideas
Existence precedes essence.
In choosing for myself I choose for all humanity.
Anguish, abandonment, despair.
The student’s dilemma — join the Free French or stay with his mother? No ethics can decide for him.
Delivered at the Club Maintenant in Paris on 29 October 1945 to an overflowing crowd. Sartre later half-regretted its simplifications.
Lines to Remember
2 quotationsMan is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
L'homme est condamné à être libre.
Context & when to use it
Condemned, because we did not create ourselves; free, because nothing determines us.
For responsibility without excuses.
Existence precedes essence.
L'existence précède l'essence.
Context & when to use it
The one-line definition of existentialism.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsExistence Precedes Essence
Sartre’s formula — humans have no pre-given nature; we exist first and make ourselves through our choices.
Critique of Practical Reason
Kant’s second Critique — the moral law is a fact of reason, and through it we know we are 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.
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.
Are We Free?
Fate, karma, determinism, compatibilism, radical freedom — the long argument over whether we choose what we do.