Sartre says that ‘existentialism’ refers to the idea that for us humans, existence precedes essence, or in other words, “subjectivity must be the starting point.”[1] (34) He says:
What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. (36)
I disagree. Just because there is no God to create a human nature, it doesn’t follow that there isn’t a human nature waiting to be discovered. I would say exactly that: Humans must discover what they really are. There are obvious constraints on what we can be; we cannot will ourselves to be just anything. Isn’t existentialism as a view supposed to acknowledge our “human condition”, which surely includes acknowledging the chasm between what we can imagine ourselves to be, and what we are forced to be? What we will is not what we get.
We are all too good at creating false narratives around ourselves. We see this in the Old Testament, where the main characters paint themselves as the good guys, chosen by God himself, and the enemy tribes as the bad guys. (There are times the Israelites are painted in a bad light too. The point remains that we tend to see ourselves, and our tribes, as special and others as ordinary, lesser, or depraved.)
We fail to be honest with ourselves about ourselves, because discovering the truth of oneself can be the most difficult and painful thing one can do. What “man makes of himself” is often a fiction convenient for his ego and survival.
I suppose Sartre has it in mind that there is no objective truth (that we have access to anyway) as to what we really are. But if that’s right, then why do some people reject their old identity as false? It's undeniable that some people will believe something about themselves, their family, their community, or their tribe, and reject those beliefs when the evidence—combined with a certain sensitivity to evidence and a certain concern for accepting the truth regardless of its cost—forces them to give up those beliefs. Often the greatest critics of Christianity, for example, are ex-Christians.
Case in point, I once believed that Christians were more moral than non-Christians, because of God’s judgment. But then I learned about the challenges to Christian belief, and about the nature of morality, and discovered that if anything Christians are specially primed to moral ignorance. Often Christians have good intentions in that they intend to follow reality’s rules. It’s just that they’ve got reality all wrong, and so deep problems emerge. (In history Christians have used their beliefs to justify slavery, racism, homophobia, misogyny, burning people at the stake, selling indulgences, covering up for abusers, forgiving abuses all too easily and pressuring victims to forgive abusers, promoted policies of forced birth despite the lack of biblical support for this, supported, and still support, the moral horrors of hell, atonement, and God’s allowing of horrendous evils, and, in recent history, many Christians have aligned themselves with Trump, an obvious non-Christian, demonstrating that for them Christianity was never about truth but about tribalism and power.)
I discovered the falsity of my beliefs. I didn't invent anything. I discovered the falsity of Christianity, and the falsity of the idea that Christians were somehow more moral or more worthy of God's approval than non-Christians. Surely Sartre, as someone who rejects religion, would understand what I am saying? Or would Sartre seriously affirm the following contradiction?:
(A) There are some people who view themselves as Children of God who are saved by Jesus and will end up in heaven.
(A2) So, there really are some people who are Children of God who are saved by Jesus and will end up in heaven. (And so, God really exists.)
(B) There are some people who view themselves as conscious organisms sprung from an evolutionary process resulting from laws of nature that are brutely contingent or brutely necessary. They see themselves as ceasing to exist when they die because there is no God.
(B2) So, there really are some people who are conscious organisms sprung from an evolutionary process resulting from laws of nature that are brutely contingent or brutely necessary and who will cease to exist when they die because there is no God. (And so, God really does not exist.)
Of course, Sartre would not affirm this contradiction. I imagine Sartre would deny that his view entails that A2 follows from A and that B2 follows from B. To suggest that is to suggest that our self-perceptions create some external, objective reality when the whole point is that there is no external, objective reality (not one accessible by us anyway), and so we have no choice but to live through a subjective lens. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” means not that we create something real, but that all we have is our self-perceptions. And thus, we are radically free to perceive ourselves one way or another.
But this quickly turns into an epistemology debate as to the nature of knowledge and our access to it. Anything that is too skeptical runs the risk of self-contradiction. By what method does Sartre discover the truth that “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself”? If the method is unreliable, then we have no reason to agree with Sartre. If the method is reliable, then we do have reliable methods by which to discover truths of human nature. And if we have reliable methods by which to discover truths of human nature, then it’s not the case that all we have is our self-perceptions. We can use these methods to discover truths about ourselves.
EJ Lowe makes a similar point within the context of metaphysics:[2]
Some people believe that the age of metaphysics is past and that what metaphysicians aspire to achieve is an impossible dream. They claim that it is an illusion to suppose that human beings can formulate and justify an undistorted picture of the fundamental structure of reality – either because reality is inaccessible to us or else because it is a myth to suppose that a reality independent of our beliefs exists at all. To these sceptics I reply that the pursuit of metaphysics is inescapable for any rational being and that they themselves demonstrate this in the objections which they raise against it. To say that reality is inaccessible to us or that there is no reality independent of our beliefs is just to make a metaphysical claim. And if they reply by admitting this while at the same time denying that they or any one else can justify metaphysical claims by reasoned argument, then my response is twofold. First, unless they can give me some reason for thinking that metaphysical claims are never justifiable, I do not see why I should accept what they say about this. Secondly, if they mean to abandon reasoned argument altogether, even in defence of their own position, then I have nothing more to say to them because they have excluded themselves from further debate.
Returning to Sartre:
“To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil.” (37)
I agree that no one deliberately does wrong. I think this view fits nicely on free will skepticism, though Sartre takes it that it increases our moral responsibility, because by affirming what we take to be good, we affirm what we take to be good for everyone. And so, one not only takes responsibility for themselves, but for all humankind. Consider:
If . . . existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist and fashion our image at one and the same time, the image is valid for everybody and for our whole age. Thus, our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed. . . . my action has involved all humanity. To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man. (37)
Response (1): Is it true that existence precedes essence?
On one reading, I disagree with this statement. On another reading, I agree with it. First, on the reading in which I disagree: Essence refers to essential properties. You can’t have essential properties without having properties. You can’t have properties without existence. And thus, essence and existence are simultaneous, and it’s false that existence precedes essence.
On the reading in which I agree that existence precedes essence: While it's true that the properties of an object we consider to be essential to that object are simultaneous with the existence of that object, and indeed we cannot even understand the very notion of existence without said properties, the consideration of what counts as essential is up to us.
We couldn’t have the experiences we do without real properties causing those experiences. We then bundle those properties under labels so we can communicate with others about our environment. I’m happy to say that our notions of ordinary objects, just like the words we use to label them, are made up as useful social constructs, and that there really are no objects over and above the properties that describe them. It’s up to us to include or exclude properties and property bundles under each label. What excludes something from a particular label is its failure to have the properties deemed essential to that label, and what counts as essential is purely a human construct.
The existence of properties precedes their bundling by us, and in that sense existence precedes essence. But this does not remotely give us free license to choose what essences things have. We are bound by rules of convention, practicality, and common sense.
Consider two objects, a mountain and a lake. Mountains and lakes have different properties. We climb mountains and swim in lakes. We do not swim in mountains or climb in lakes. Mountains are large, rocky geological formations, and lakes are bodies of water. And so on. It’s not clear at first what counts as a mountain or what counts as a lake. That is, it’s not clear what the essential properties of these things are. If the mountain gets small enough, at some point it becomes a hill. If the lake gets small enough, at some point it becomes a pond.
The problem of vagueness is one of the main reasons to think that objects are just social constructs. If objects exist over and above their properties, then mountains and hills as such truly exist, and there would be an exact moment the mountain becomes a hill were we to shrink it. But what could that exact moment possibly be? There’s no non-arbitrary answer. It makes more sense to say that there is no objective truth of the matter of when a mountain becomes a hill or when a lake becomes a pond; it’s just a matter of the social convention surrounding how these words are used and the general intuitions we form by these conventions.
There is a fact of the matter about those conventions, which is why I say we do not have free license to choose what properties count as essential for any given bundle of properties. It’s not up to a single person. If I pointed at a creek and said to someone, “I will jump into that lake over there”, the person I’m speaking with will look confused and say, “‘Lake’?! That's not a lake!” If my interlocutor cannot come up with a precise definition of lake, that is irrelevant. We just use our intuition. Essences need not be precisely known to be there. If there weren’t an essence to ‘lake’, then my interlocutor would not have said “That's not a lake” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
We bundle so automatically, effortlessly, and instantly, that it’s impossible for us not to bundle as soon as we are capable of understanding our physical environment. So psychologically speaking, even bundling happens at the same time the properties cause us to experience them. (The only exception perhaps being when we are infants, right before we’ve developed basic language abilities. But the moment we have labels, we have bundles.) Of course, many properties existed before humans did, and in that sense existence precedes essence in that the existence of properties precedes humans assigning essences to bundles. The properties that make up mountains and lakes existed before humans bundled them under the labels ‘mountain’ and ‘lake.’
Response (2): I don't see how anything can be “valid for everybody” if we are what we make ourselves to be. Why would Sartre deny absolute truth only to affirm it?
Perhaps Sartre is saying that it would be hypocritical of us to make ourselves an exception to rules we live by, and thus, if we want to avoid the irrationality of hypocrisy, we have no choice but to include everyone under our rules. How Kantian! But a problem with Kant’s universalization applies here too, which brings me to Response 3:
Response (3): It’s clearly false that if I marry, then I am involving all of humanity in my marriage. When a gay couple gets married, does that mean they are involving all of humanity in the sense that they believe only gay marriage should be allowed? I trust that Sartre isn’t saying something so silly. But recall what Sartre says:
To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. (37)
This sounds clearly false to me. Obviously when we make decisions for ourselves, we very much do not include all of humanity. We include only those people who exist in circumstances relevantly similar to our own (or even only exactly our own). We may consider, and rightly consider, our own circumstances to be so unique that while we rightly approve of a decision we make, we rightly condemn anyone else making the same decision, because, after all, it’s not the same decision.
We tend to abstract out actions and universalize them, when in reality actions are never universal. No one ever merely “gets an abortion”; instead, it’s always this person getting this abortion in these circumstances and for these reasons. There will always be at least slight differences from one story to the next.
With that said, universalizing actions isn’t always wrong, as it is often the case that the details between two stories are morally equivalent such that the reasons to refrain from the action in one story will apply just as well to the next. But we always run the risk of misapplying things when we do this. It would be a misapplication, for instance, to think that someone must believe that all abortions of all kinds are justified regardless of circumstances just because they had an abortion. (Not to mention, we universalize actions because it would be way too complicated not to. We cannot come up with endless versions of the word “theft” to include all imaginable variations of morally significant circumstances in which someone commits theft.)
So first, we have the epistemic aspect of existentialism, which appears to make existentialism a form of skepticism with respect to our ability to access the truth about human nature. I’m more optimistic of our ability to access truth, and I would want to steer clear from the kind of skepticism that becomes self-defeating.
Then second, we have the metaphysical aspect of existentialism of “existence precedes essence.” If we read that as saying “Properties precede essential properties”, then I have mixed feelings. Psychologically, properties are simultaneous with essential properties in the sense that humans bundle properties under labels as soon as they start learning language.
Ontologically, properties and essential properties exist simultaneously, as essential properties are a social carve-out of the properties already there.
Though I’m happy to say that properties exist prior to our bundling them under labels, and in that sense properties exist prior to their essentializing by us. But that doesn’t mean we can choose which properties are essential; that’s up to the complex confluence of sociolinguistic influences. All we can do is try to identify the essential properties of things.
So I don't see us as radically free to self-determine what we are. We are locked into what we are, and it’s up to us to discover and accept what we are or fail to discover or fail to accept what we are.
[1] Sarte, Jean-Paul. Essays in Existentialism. Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1965.
[2] Lowe, E.J. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.