1905–1980
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) is a phenomenological ontology of consciousness, nothingness, and bad faith. The 1945 lecture published in 1946 as Existentialism Is a Humanism says, in a public and simplified way, that existence precedes essence and that we are responsible for the values we invent. That lecture should not be substituted for the book. Sartre’s freedom is not the same claim as the metaphysical libertarianism of the agency axis, though the two are often confused.
Also in the atlas
- Existence and essence
- Bad faith
- Situation
Reading, not a syllabus ranking
- Being and Nothingness (1943) — Consciousness, negation, the look, and bad faith.
- Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) — A lecture that states the invented-value claim more bluntly than the treatise.
Questions for reflection
- If there is no human essence to consult, what makes one project a betrayal of another person?
Sartre belongs beside created meaning. Do not read the agency letter L as “Sartre’s freedom.”