Existence, Essence and the Human Condition Theme Analysis

The driving observation behind Sartre’s existentialism is his notion that “existence precedes essence.” For Sartre, there is no preexisting human essence, set by God or nature, that determines what people should or will do. As a result, each individual must define their own essence, and their essence is merely the sum of their actions.

Essence, broadly, refers to the necessary properties that make a thing what it is. For at least two thousand years before Sartre, philosophers looked for a human essence by asking about characteristics common to all people. Generally, debates over the human essence concentrated on a problem inherited from Plato and Aristotle: did humans’ distinctive nature come from their form (an immaterial soul or mind) or their substance (biological matter)? Either way, determining the “essence” of humankind meant defining human nature in terms of its relationship to historical, biological, divine, and/or social forces. The resulting picture of the human essence promised not only to define humanity and predict human behavior, but also allow a framework for human morality to emerge. Sartre gives two examples of normal cases where essence would precede existence: the paper knife and the conventional picture of God. The paper knife’s essence is present in the mind of its human creator (who designs it for the particular purpose of cutting paper) before the knife actually exists. Similarly, under the conventional Christian picture, God creates humans from the mental blueprint of his own image. In this view, the “idea” of someone exists before that person is born, and the person’s life consists of growing to fulfill the destiny already set out for them in that idea.

Sartre responds to the problem of determining the human essence by throwing out the accepted wisdom that such an essence is universal at all. Although he was not the first to do so, and although he by no means denies the biological or behavioral similarities among people, Sartre nevertheless thinks that the essence of who any individual really is has nothing to do with humans’ universal traits. He argues that people do not live out predefined lives, but rather define themselves by living; people are not born with a readymade essence that determines who they are, but rather they choose their own essence through their commitments and actions. This is what he means when he says that, for humans, “existence precedes essence.”

Because existence precedes essence, Sartre argues that living a human life means having a projection and a project. These are the defining features of human subjectivity. Human life includes a projection in the sense that everyone imagines themselves: what they are like, what they will be like, and what they want to be like. This conscious projection of the self into the future constitutes each person’s developing sense of their own identity, meaning, or essence. The human project is acting to become what one projects oneself to be. Sartre compares a human life to an art project: both are capable of creating meaning through creativity and circumstance, even though there is no preset goal for either at the outset and there are no objective criteria for making the “best” piece of art or living the “best” human life. Instead, Sartre says that the measure of success in life is authenticity, or whether a person “is what he projects himself to be”—whether that person’s beliefs, actions, and self-image are consistent, or—in other words—whether their project matches their projection.

Sartre calls this state of living as a subject in the world the human condition. He argues that the true human universal is not a shared human nature, but rather this shared human condition. In other words, he thinks that there is no collective set of inherent traits that “define” human beings, besides the fact that each person necessarily has “to be in the world, to work in it, to live out his life in it among others, and, eventually, to die in it.” Existentialism, then, is a “humanism” in the sense that it starts from this universal human condition, but not in the sense that it believes human beings all share an inherent nature or value.