Jean-Paul Sartre argues that through anguish, abandonment, and despair human existence is revealed to be characterised by radical freedom and radical responsibility. In the face of this, individuals must either accept this condition authentically or escape into bad faith. A critical reflection on Sartre’s project reveals that the lived experience of the existentialist often resembles that of individuals adhering to the traditional value systems he rejects, raising the question of whether his existentialism merely repackaged those systems in a different form. The essay will proceed first by explaining Sartre’s view that human beings possess no preordained essence and they must therefore determine their essence through their actions. It will then analyse what anguish, abandonment and despair reveal about human nature, including the roles of authenticity and bad faith in responding to these phenomena. Finally, it will critically assess whether Sartre’s framework, despite his rejection of traditional value systems, ultimately recreates their structure.
Before explaining how the phenomena of anguish, abandonment and despair reveal radical human freedom, Sartre’s view on the human condition as lacking predetermined essence must be analysed. For Sartre, the human condition is defined by the principle that existence precedes essence (Sartre 2007, 22). Sartre uses the term essence to refer to the defining nature or purpose of a thing. The essence of a watch can be thought of as something that tells the time while being strapped to the wrist. The essence of a bucket is to contain, transport and pour water. Sartre argues that the essences of these items precede their existence because their structure and purpose are determined prior to their creation. For human beings, no such predetermined function or role exists (Sartre 2007, 22-23). While humans exist as beings with agency, self-awareness, and the capacity for sustained, deliberate action, there is, by default, no preordained purpose to direct these faculties or give meaning to them. Many religious belief systems maintain that human beings are created by God who endows them with an essence such as a soul. Followers of these systems may identify with such essences and act in accordance with divine guidance taught through scriptures or from religious authorities. This view, sometimes called essentialism, has fallen out of favour for many in the West in the past few centuries. Sartre’s claim that existence precedes essence is a statement about the condition of such individuals, and much of his philosophical work is dedicated to reorienting them to an existence where essence must be created through deliberate action.
Sartre’s claim that a person is “nothing other than what he makes of himself” (Sartre 2007, 22) follows directly from this condition. He argues that a human being’s identity is therefore determined through their actions, rather than any predetermined nature or purpose. In the absence of such an essence, there is no external standard or guidance that can determine how one ought to act or what one should become (Sartre 2007, 28-29). Each individual must instead determine this through their own choices. This condition constitutes what Sartre calls radical freedom: the inescapable necessity of choosing. From this freedom follows radical responsibility, as individuals must bear responsibility for the actions they choose and the values those actions express. Radical freedom and radical responsibility are therefore inseparable features of human existence, and are further disclosed in lived experience, first through what Sartre calls anguish.
When a person is confronted with the necessity of defining themselves and deliberating on what they ought to become, they encounter what Sartre calls anguish (Sartre 2007, 25-26). Anguish is the state that accompanies the recognition of the full responsibility that accompanies choice. For Sartre, every choice a person makes, the responsibility of that choice is the sole property of the decider alone. One may heed the advice of others, conform to social expectations, or act in accordance with their inclinations and emotions, yet in each case the responsibility for the choice remains their own. Here, anguish arises as an uneasiness or anxious affect that is, according to Sartre, inescapable. One cannot successfully evade anguish by simply avoiding difficult choices since abstaining from decisions also constitutes a choice. Moreover, one also encounters anguish from the realisation that their choices are implicit statements about the permissibility of such choices for others. Whether this implicit statement takes the form of a career choice, an apparently immoral action, or even a fashion statement, the implication of permissibility remains. Sartre illustrates anguish through the biblical example of Abraham, who is commanded by angels to sacrifice his son (Sartre 2007, 26). After receiving the command, Abraham is free to act in whichever way he chooses, and no external authority can relieve him of responsibility. He must bear the consequences of either sacrificing his son or disobeying God, as well as the implication of the permissibility of his choice.
Anguish first and foremost reveals that human beings are radically free and responsible for their actions, but also that they can either assume this condition authentically or fall into what Sartre calls bad faith. Freedom in this sense is a necessary and inescapable human condition. Sartre, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, says that “man is condemned to be free” (Sartre 2007, 29), stripping freedom of its often positive connotation and instead presenting it as a burden. Anguish arises from this burden as a sharp awareness of one’s responsibility that results from their choices and actions, particularly those of significant consequence. To assume this condition authentically is to accept one’s radical freedom and responsibility and to act in full awareness of it. On one hand, this involves confronting the full weight of one’s responsibility, but it also demands a heightened awareness of what one is choosing and affirming through their actions.
If authenticity means accepting radical freedom and responsibility, then attempts to avoid this responsibility often occur in what Sartre calls “bad faith”. An act of bad faith is not merely a lie one tells oneself in order to evade responsibility, since lying presupposes a division between one who knows the truth and one who is deceived. In bad faith, however, the same consciousness must both know and conceal the truth (Sartre 1956, 86-89). It is therefore a distinctive structure of consciousness in which one recognises a truth, namely, one’s own freedom and responsibility, yet refuses to properly acknowledge it or instead attempts to distance themselves from it. It is an attempt by a free being to escape the burden of their own freedom and responsibility. When bad faith arises in response to anguish, it is characterised by an individual acting as though their choices are determined by something other than themselves, while simultaneously concealing from themselves that they are the sole source of those choices. In Sartre’s play No Exit, audiences meet Joseph Garcin who, through his reluctance to take responsibility for his actions, demonstrates bad faith in anguish (Sartre, No Exit). In the play, Garcin is in hell contemplating the circumstances of his recent execution. He was tried and convicted as a deserter before being sentenced to death by firing squad. Prior to this, he worked as a journalist for a pacifist newspaper, and when war broke out, he chose to desert rather than fight. Instead of accepting responsibility for his decision, he attempts to disavow it by appealing to the notion that as a pacifist, he had no choice but to desert. In the eyes of his former comrades as well as Inez, his cohabitant in hell, he is considered a coward. Instead of accepting the responsibility for this label as the result of a choice he made, he attempts to resist it and seeks approval from Inez as he attempts to reinterpret his situation. Inez refuses his attempt. While not made explicit in the play, Garcin’s need for Inez’s approval suggests an underlying awareness of his responsibility, which he attempts to evade by appealing to his pacifism as though it determined his actions. In doing so, he exemplifies bad faith in anguish, evading responsibility for his choice.
Abandonment is the recognition that there is no God, value system, or justification available to ground or excuse human choices and actions. Sartre echoes Dostoevsky’s warning that “without God, everything is permissible” (Sartre 2007, 28-29) and suggests that humanity faces an existence where external justifications and excuses are unable to legislate their behaviour. The term ‘abandoned’ is fitting because it describes a condition in which all prior structures of value have collapsed, leaving behind a void where humans are alone without justification, excuses, or objective rules to guide them. This void is not merely the absence of God and the Christian value structures but of all modes of external justification. This is because any appeal to a value or principle presupposes a prior choice to adopt it over alternatives. If the authority of a value depends upon such a choice, then it cannot serve as an independent ground for action. Therefore, no value or principle can function as a justification that determines action independently of the individual. Actions made according to signs, symbols, or revelation are similarly constituted in that the choice to act according to them requires a free choice. Justification does not always take the form of a rational process of consulting values and deliberating the best course of action; it often occurs as backwards rationalisation. An individual who acted irrationally might seek to retroactively excuse their actions by claiming they were acting according to a poorly calibrated determining force such as their so-called human nature. This is untenable to Sartre, who claims if existence precedes essence, then humans have no fixed or given essence prior to their actions. A fixed ‘human nature’ would be exactly such an essence: something that determines or explains what humans are and how they act. Therefore, there is no human nature in the sense required to explain or justify action (Sartre 2007, 29). Sartre has undermined not only particular mechanisms humans have historically used to justify their actions, but also the fundamental process of justification itself. By pointing out that individuals always choose one justification over another establishes that humans still necessarily make that choice freely.
Just as anguish reveals that humans are simultaneously radically free to act, and radically responsible for the consequences of their actions, abandonment reveals that the freedom-responsibility duality extends to include all possible justifications for such actions. The term abandonment serves as a vivid symbolic description of the lived experience of the newly minted existentialist. An individual who once found safety in the justifications of divine command or rational moral principles to choose for them realises that they were illusions. Upon realising, the structures they relied upon disappear leaving them completely alone to navigate the choices unassisted and vulnerable to the weight of the consequences. This imagery further exemplifies the words of Sartre when he declared “man is condemned to be free”. Just as radical freedom renders the individual as the sole author of their actions, without recourse to any external source of justification, radical freedom and radical responsibility is deepened.
Freedom in the face of abandonment does not mean rejecting religion, reason, or intuition as guides, but recognising that they cannot decide what one should do on their own. Instead, it is up to the individual to choose how to interpret, understand and follow them, and to take responsibility for that choice. In this way, abandonment can be faced authentically. Sartre recalls meeting a Jesuit priest, who after experiencing a series of misfortunes including the death of his father, a heartbreak, and flunking out of military school, interpreted these events as a sign that he should join the order of Jesuits (Sartre 2007, 33-34). His choice to follow this sign could easily be seen as foolish or irrational in the eyes of another. In contrast, Sartre praises the man. In treating the sign as meaningful and acting upon it, he assumes full responsibility for the meaning he assigns to it. Abandonment in this sense also reveals that humans alone determine their meaning and create their own values. Abandonment means to stand firmly within one’s own reasons and values, to progress through life while following one’s own guiding light and to take responsibility for those values.
Where bad faith in anguish involves disavowing one’s freedom and responsibility in choosing, bad faith in abandonment involves disavowing one’s freedom and responsibility in justifying those choices. Bad faith in abandonment can be observed in any instance where one claims an inescapable obligation to act according to a particular value. In doing so, they misplace the responsibility for their actions onto the value itself, treating it as if it determines what must be done independently of their choice. No one can genuinely claim that a justification makes decisions for them; therefore, any decision they claim is supposedly necessitated by a value system is an instance of bad faith. Bad faith can also arise when appealing to one’s own personal nature. If a person behaves regrettably, they may blame their personal internal qualities such as a tendency towards anger believed to be inherited, stress caused by jet lag, or even their zodiac identity. All of these share a displaced responsibility in that they treat contingent features of the individual as determining their actions, rather than recognising that it is the individual who chooses how to respond to them, and is therefore responsible for justifying their behaviour.
Despair is the realisation that while one has freedom over their actions, they ultimately cannot control the outcomes of those actions (Sartre 2007, 34-35). An individual’s will inevitably encounters limitations as it pushes outwards into the world, restricting what they can influence. This resistance can arise from a wide range of phenomena. One may discover that their projects conflict with the desires of those of another person who, for one reason or another, acts to undermine them. Barriers can arise from social, economic, cultural or political realities or from circumstances that cannot be predicted or controlled. A person can act deliberately to bring about some end, but the force of the world is magnitudes more powerful such that humans will always and invariably encounter debilitating limitations and, as a result, despair. Because of the inescapability of limitations, despair is not a contingent psychological state, but a structural feature of human existence.
Despair reveals that humans must act without any guarantee of success due to the limitations imposed by external reality (Sartre 2007, 36-37). To act in the face of despair, Sartre suggests that one must limit themselves to reckoning with only what lies within one’s control, or within a range of probabilities that favour their desired outcome. When the possibilities one’s actions are contending with are no longer within their ability to influence, Sartre advises that one should no longer rely on them. Persevering against unfavourable odds opens one up to sharpened experience of despair, as their designs are exposed to an increased likelihood of failure. Rather than fall into passivity and quietism, Sartre argues that one must rather act without hope, for no action necessarily requires a hopeful disposition in order to be carried out (Sartre 2007, 36). In this way one may separate themselves from an excess of despair. One can also face despair authentically without restraining from engaging with unfavourable probabilities. An individual might pursue a risky enterprise in full awareness of the decreased chance of success, and potentially damaging consequences should they fail. Provided they take responsibility for their potential failure, pushing against limitations can be a character developing experience. In cases where the enterprise is successful, it could bring prosperity to the individual or their community. Bad faith in light of despair can be seen in the behaviour of a gambler who knows the odds are against them, but relates to that knowledge in a distorted way. For instance, a gambler who is on a losing streak might then believe that they are due for a win. Their understanding of their odds is not reflected in their decisions, and they proceed as though the outcomes will favour them regardless.
Having outlined Sartre’s account of anguish, abandonment, and despair, a critical examination of his existentialism reveals that a number of elements in his framework appear to be reminiscent of structures from the traditional systems he rejects. In particular, his condition of radical freedom and responsibility is comparable to the concept of an essence, and shows phenomenological similarities to many aspects of the lived-experience of the followers of Christianity.
Sartre explicitly rejects the notion that humans possess a preordained essence but asserts that humans are radically free, radically responsible for their actions, and must define themselves through them. These qualities are universal in that they apply to all humans and are inescapable conditions of human existence. As a universal and inescapable condition structuring human existence, the question of whether radical freedom and responsibility can be considered an essence in its own right arises. In his example of a paper-knife, Sartre uses the term “essence” to refer to the characteristics or purpose that exist prior to its existence. A paper-knife’s essence precedes its existence because it is produced according to a prior specification of its function (Sartre 2007, 21). While Sartre denies that humans are created with a preordained function, he nevertheless maintains that all human existence takes place under the condition of being condemned to be free. Since this condition is universal and inescapable for all humans, and dictates a fundamental phenomenological construct within which human experiences will be shaped, it can be interpreted as functioning in a way analogous to an essence. Moreover, the condition of being condemned to be free does not arise from any factors contingent on an individual’s existence and is logically prior to any individual’s existence. Thus, essence as an analogy of the default human condition precedes the existence of each human. In interpreting the inescapable condition of human freedom in this way, a tension emerges as to whether Sartre can fully maintain the claim that existence precedes essence.
While Sartre rejects objective moral frameworks, his existentialism retains structural similarities to them such that the experience of a Sartrean existentialist as a moral agent resembles that of a Christian or of an individual adhering to a secular moral doctrine such as Kantian ethics. Sartre asserts that when an individual acts, they implicitly state that their action is permissible for others. The experience of this in practice aligns with the experience of a Kantian who adheres to the categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (Kant 1785/1997, 4:421). Sartre and Kant are operating in fundamentally different frameworks: while Kant is espousing a normative principle, Sartre is offering a description of a phenomenological structure. Nevertheless, anguish in the Sartrean sense would likely present to the Kantian in similar force and form as it does to the existentialist since they both experience their actions as universal moral statements.
The experience of abandonment in the absence of external justification can also present clearly to a Christian who is faced with a complex moral decision in which divine guidance is unclear, conflicts with other guidance, or is absent entirely. For instance, a devout Christian might be forced to make a choice between forgiveness and justice. Consulting the Bible the Christian finds two contradictory values: “But I say unto you, that ye not resist evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” – (Matthew 5:39), and, “And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him; breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.” – (Leviticus 24:19-20). This contradiction in guidance offers no guidance or justification for which the Christian can consult in choosing to act. They must nevertheless choose, and face responsibility for their choice. Thus, they are effectively abandoned in the Sartrean sense.
The existentialist’s experience of anguish and abandonment has a structural resemblance to the experience of judgement in a theological belief system. While Christian theology externalises judgement as a divine function of God, in existentialism, judgement can be interpreted as an internal process whereby radical responsibility manifests as guilt following a severe moral error. In Crime and Punishment, Rodion Raskolnikov experiences guilt following a murder he commits, as though it were the wrath of God, despite believing he had sufficient justification for his actions (Dostoevsky 1866). When an existentialist deliberates on how to act, anguish and abandonment contain an implicit element of judgement that is also present in the experience of a Christian seeking to act in a manner that avoids the judgement and wrath of God.
While Jean-Paul Sartre explicitly omits normative claims, his framework nevertheless generates normativity indirectly through its account of radical freedom and responsibility. Humans are condemned to be free, fully responsible for their actions and unable to justify or excuse them through external systems. While these are not explicit moral prescriptions, such as the Bible’s commandments, they nevertheless load the individual with moral weight, insofar as one is forced to decide how to act while remaining fully answerable for those choices. In deliberating on how to act, the existentialist can be said to generate a form of self-contained normativity.
Sartre’s existentialism presents human existence as radically free and, as a consequence, radically responsible for their actions. He argues that humans possess no preordained essence and instead must define their essence through their actions. Through the phenomena of anguish, abandonment, and despair, human freedom is revealed to be an inescapable condition, leading Sartre to claim that man is condemned to be free. A critical analysis of Sartre’s existentialism reveals that through expounding on radical freedom and responsibility, he describes the human condition such that it can be interpreted as an essence in that it is universal, inescapable, and defines humans in a precise way. Given that this condition necessarily applies to all humans, it is logically prior to their existence, and therefore precedes their existence. Additionally, by revealing the similarities between the lived experience of an existentialist and that of a person adhering to a traditional belief system, Sartre’s existentialism appears to reintroduce the structural features of the moral frameworks it seeks to reject. This raises the question of whether Sartre’s existentialism really departs from those frameworks, or simply repackages them in a different form. Despite this potential criticism, Sartre nevertheless contributes something truly novel through his conception of bad faith. It is possible to act in a manner that adheres to Christian morality or Kantian ethics which is compliant on the surface, yet covertly immoral. The value of bad faith is that it teaches an individual to recognize and expose the evasion of their responsibility before their conscience, thereby increasing their capacity for making more productive moral choices.
Bibliography
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1992. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage.
The Holy Bible, King James Version.
Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2007. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. Edited by John Kulka. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. n.d. No Exit. Accessed via https://ia600303.us.archive.org/13/items/NoExit/NoExit.pdf