Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism & Libertarianism

Sartre was an existentialist. He believed that 'existence comes before essence'; this means that we are not born with a particular 'nature' but must 'create'  ourselves as we go along. We respond to our experiences of the world, but we are not determined by them, we are free to choose who we are and how we live. Sartre claims that 'man' isn't simply 'what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills.' (my emphasis).

Roughly speaking Sartre believes that the very nature of consciousness is what enables human beings to have free will. He thinks that being conscious of - being able to imagine the different possible futures that might come about from different actions, enables us to choose our path.

THE GAP: For Sartre, being conscious of the world seems to allow us to stand back from our lives and interpret them in different ways. This seems to open up a distance between our consciousness and the rest of the 'physical' world. This is what Sartre call 'the gap' and it is the gap that allows us to have free will. Easy.

Although sympathetic to Marx's political philosophy, Sartre reverses Marx's belief that 'life determines consciousness', claiming instead that 'consciousness determines life.'

Whereas Marx believed that the way we think about the world and how we act is determined by our experience of the world, Sartre believed that we choose our experience of the world by the way we think about our place and role in the world.

For Marx the world makes us who we are. For Sartre we make ourselves who we are, and by doing so we make the world. Because he thinks that human beings have free will Sartre can be described as a libertarian, but we should be clear that he is a libertarian for different reasons to Descartes and Thomas Pink.

COWARDS and SCUM

Sartre is rather hard on determinists, he says,

Those who hide from this total freedom ... with deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards. Others, who try to show that their existence is necessary ... I shall call scum.

He claims that there two kinds of 'beings': humans are 'beings for themselves', everything else, rocks, trees are 'beings in themselves.' (He doesn't mention animals!). More of this next year possibly, for now the fact that he thinks consciousness gives us free will is enough.

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