Existentialism and Phenomenology in France

Jean-Paul Sartre brought phenomenology to a mass audience and gave existentialism its most systematic philosophical statement in Being and Nothingness (1943), subtitled 'An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.' Sartre's central distinction is between being-in-itself (en-soi), the full, self-identical, non-conscious mode of being characteristic of mere things, and being-for-itself (pour-soi), the mode of being characteristic of consciousness, which is never simply identical with itself but is always a lack, a nothingness at the heart of being that opens up possibility, negation, and choice. From this ontology Sartre derives his famous slogan that, for human beings alone, 'existence precedes essence': unlike a manufactured object such as a paper-knife, which is made according to a prior concept or purpose, a human being first exists, and only afterward, through free choices and actions, defines what he or she is. Because there is no pre-given human nature or God-given purpose to consult, Sartre holds that human beings are 'condemned to be free': radically responsible for creating their own values and their own essence through action, a freedom so total and inescapable that it becomes, in Sartre's account, a source of anguish rather than mere liberation.