Sartre's Genius Philosophy - Life’s Meaning Comes from Nothingness

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”—Jean-Paul Sartre Hey everyone, For thousands of years humans believed that god created us, therefore we didn’t need to worry about the meaning of life. God has given us a simple purpose in life: be good so we end up in heaven. But God has also thrown a spanner in the works by giving us free will to make choices, good or bad, which determines our destination in heaven or

hell. It’s a neat little story that makes life so much easier. At least psychologically, because it takes away the responsibility of us having our own purpose or meaning. Then came the scientific revolution in Europe that questioned the religious version of the human story as too simplistic and some of the religious understanding of the world just outright wrong. For example, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and then Darwin put forward scientific theories that challenged the religious version of our existence. So philosophers looked to science to explain existence. But science is simply a tool for survival, making life easier and

more comfortable through technology and medicine, therefore it has no answer for the meaning of life. In the 17th and 18th centuries, humanism replaced god with rational humans as the master of the earth, and put progress as life’s ultimate purpose. But wars and devastating violence in the 19th century, the Napoleonic wars, and then the two world wars in the 20th century showed us that rationality and progress are a little too wishful thinking. We are just as violent and savage as ancient times. Only our tools and weapons have gotten better but our psychology is still quite primitive

and savage. Then came Sartre who offered a new answer to the meaning of life. He said there is no god. But the godless world is not a bad thing. It’s in fact a great opportunity for us to create meaning for ourselves. Since we have no divine essence inside us from birth, it allows us to make one ourselves. Sartre replaced religious essentialism with existentialism. In other words, we have no essence prior to our existence, therefore it’s our responsibility to make our own essence. At birth we are a blank slate and it’s our job to draw a

nice little picture or story on that slate. So to put it somewhat crudely, religion is like a package holiday; most things are planned, while existentialism is more like backpacking, you make up as you go along. So today, I will talk about Jean-Paul Sartre’s life, books, philosophical ideas and finally some philosophical secrets we can learn from him. So get yourself an empty cup of coffee and let’s talk about nothingness, emptiness and existentialism. This is probably the most comprehensive video on Sartre. By the end of this video you will know Sartre as if he was your uncle.

Life Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 into a Parisian bourgeois family. Two years later his father died and his mother married another man. As a young boy, he was small and suffered from a terrible condition as a result he was bullied. Due to his family’s wealth, he was educated at some prestigious schools where he was exposed to philosophy, and psychology as well as some influential figures of French intellectual life later on. One of his earliest influences was Henri Bergson, whose philosophy of vitalism emphasised human intuition as a guiding tool in our understanding of reality. Bergson’s

philosophy of time also influenced Marcel Proust, particularly his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, which is my favourite novel of all time. While Proust enjoyed the established high society of Paris, Sartre flourished in the new, and somewhat anti-establishment intellectual Parisian scene. As a somewhat small and ugly young man, he felt more comfortable going against the establishment so he organised public events that questioned the status quo, including pranks that attracted thousands of people and caused scandals. Sartre felt alienated due to his looks so his philosophy of existentialism in which everything starts from zero was a paradigm

shift he needed to feel at home. Good-looking people rarely go against the conventional establishment. Sartre as a short man, only 153cm or 5 feet wanted to change reality. In 1929 he met the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir with whom he had a life-long open relationship. Sartre exercised his freedom by sleeping around more often than de Beauvoir. While working as a school teacher, Sartre read Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s brilliant masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night, an anti-war, anti-establishment and deeply pessimistic yet profoundly beautiful novel, which I have discussed here. A year later, in 1933, he went

to Germany to study under Edmund Husserl, the father of German phenomenology. Around this time, he also read Hegel’s masterpiece the Phenomenology of Spirit, which puts history as the most important factor in shaping who we are. In other words, we are the product of history and the period we live in. Hegel believed in a progressive history, meaning we are heading towards a kind of utopian perfectionist world, which Marx turned into a communist state. For Hegel figures such as Napoleon were able to symbolise the spirit of the age so to speak. Coincidentally, while Sartre was in Germany,

another big dude came to power. In 1933, Hitler’s Nazi Party won the German election. From a Hegelian perspective, Hitler was able to capture the imaginations of the Germans or the spirit of the age in Germany of the 1930s. Sartre, however, saw Hegel’s history-based philosophy as a good starting point to develop his own existentialist philosophy, in which instead of focusing on society’s history shaping our identity, he focused on our own individual history that allows us to make ourselves who we want to be. In other words, Sartre combined Hegelian social history with Kierkegaard’s individualistic freedom to develop

an individualised existentialist philosophy. It’s not only society shaping us but our own individual life giving us the opportunity to make choices and shape our own identity and essence as who we are. But more on his philosophy later. In 1938, he published his most famous philosophical novel, Nausea, in which his protagonist feels nauseated due to his life being empty and meaningless on the inside, as though he is an object without consciousness. Sartre was influenced by Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in which the unnamed protagonist decides to retreat from society altogether in an underground room, like a wounded

animal while refusing to get help. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, too the protagonist turns into an insect and unable to provide for his family which ultimately decides his fate. In Sartre’s novel, the protagonist realises his own empty life and goes through an internal metamorphosis and comes out transformed into an existentialist hero. The timing of this novel is quite apt as a year later Hitler embarked on his world conquest with terrible consequences. The individual German soldiers or generals ignored their responsibility of questioning the authority and blindly followed order. While Hegel might have looked at the force of history,

Sartre put the blame squarely on the individual. In 1939, with the outbreak of World War 1, Sartre was drafted into the French army, but a year later he was captured by the Germans. Ironically, in Celine’s novel, the protagonist voluntarily tries to get captured by the Germans so who knows it might have inspired Sartre to hand himself over to the Germans, knowing that the French had little chance against them. Joking aside, he used his prison time to read and write. In Celine’s novel, the protagonist talks about prison being the safest place during a war, because as

a prisoner you’re protected from the enemy. This prison time also allowed him to sit down and concentrate on an extremely difficult book by Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Prison gives you both being and time. Heidegger based his philosophy on time as finite for the individual, only limited between birth and death. Realising that life is short makes us anticipate death which forces us to live authentically. Later on Sartre wrote his own philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, in direct response to Heidegger’s philosophy. In 1941, due to his health, the Germans released him, mainly his eye-sight was getting

worse. He became a school teacher. With access to a lot of students and having plenty of time, he became politically active by founding a socialist group called Socialism and Liberty. In other words, he took the French Revolution of 1789 slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity and removed the fraternity because it had nationalistic connotation. But his group failed to attract support from other prominent French writers and intellectuals, partly due to how shockingly well the German occupiers were treating the French people, polite and respectful and partly because the intellectuals didn’t want to risk their own freedom. As

a result Sartre abandoned the group and instead focused on writing his masterpiece, Being and Nothingness which was published in 1943. I will discuss it later. During the German occupation Sartre wrote articles lamenting how the French were pacified by the Germans, which were published in newspapers including Combat, a paper created by none other than the other French existentialist giant, Albert Camus. The two philosophers were close friends in Paris throughout the 1940s, but later on they had a fallout due to their political differences after Camus published his philosophical book, the Rebel in 1951. Sartre was seeking a

Maoist-style Marxist revolution, taking power through force especially in Colonial Africa and Asia, while Camus preferred peaceful reforms as a method of political change. They also differed in how to treat French collaborators during the German occupation. Sartre wanted a swift death penalty while Camus wanted a less severe punishment. Again, violence vs reform. During the Cold War between the socialist east and the capitalist west, Sartre sided with the Russians but on a more fundamental level he sided with the poor south fighting European colonialism, specially in Algeria. He travelled to Cuba and met the communist revolutionaries such as

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. He also traveled to the Soviet Union. Sartre was also aware that Europe was losing its dominance to the Americans to the west and the Russians to the east, so he proposed a united states of Europe, a kind of union among all Europeans. He saw that people in different parts of Europe were suffering from the same problems, such as poverty, lack of housing or freedom, so it made sense to fight for a united Europe. Also he realised that the working class in Europe had no appetite for revolution, so he saw the

opportunity of a socialist revolution only in the third world. Sartre was vehemently opposed to American political and cultural imperialism influencing everyone including the French. Throughout the 1960s, Sartre was active in students’ demonstrations in Paris and became a household name, as the biggest social justice warrior of his age. In 1968, he was arrested for civil disobedience but pardoned by Charles de Gaulle, likening him to Voltaire the father of individual freedom. In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he refused to receive it due to his political stance against the capitalist west but also

by taking the prize he thought he was becoming part of the Nobel establishment which would have limited him as an independent writer. In the same year, he criticised literature as a whole for being nothing but a pacifying tool. In the same way, George Orwell wrote his anti-art article saying that art only serves the interest of the ruling class. Sartre also attacked the artistic writing of Marcel Proust as a bourgeois fantasy that cushioned and shielded people from the harsh reality of life. As a serious Proust fan myself, Sartre does have a point, in that Proust’s writing

is a form of withdrawing from society, while Sartre wanted to engage in society. In his 1945 novel trilogy, The Road to Freedom, Sartre criticises Proust’s escape from socio-political issues by taking refuge in art, and instead, Sartre engages in political and social life in order to change society by bringing more freedom. But I would still read more of Proust than Sartre, because Proust reveals artistic beauty we are often unable to see in real life because politics can also blind us to see beauty sometimes. I guess I prefer the solitary Proustian artistic life than the political Sartrian

life. Not saying Sartre couldn’t see, despite his eyesight, he saw things from a Marxist class point of view, while Proust sees things more intuitively which is closer to nature. In 1971 he published the first part of a monumental biography of Gustave Flaubert, in which he psychoanalysed the great French writer, arguing that his epileptic attack in 1843 when he was 22 sealed his fate as a writer, forcing him to abandon his plan of becoming a lawyer. However, this detailed biography of Flaubert was never finished as Sartre’s own health deteriorated, becoming completely blind in 1973. He died

in 1980, aged 74. Being hugely famous as a public intellectual, his funeral attracted 50,000 people, clogging the streets of Paris. Also probably because the French like clogging the streets for protests, strikes, or funerals. Any excuse to not go to work. I’m only joking of course. Sartre started as a philosopher of the individual but later in life, he worked very hard to reconcile his individualistic existentialist philosophy with the collective philosophy of Marxism which interprets the world, not through the lens of the individual but through the lens of the group, i.e. class. This is in contrast to

Camus who started as a Marxist but towards the end of his life moved slightly away from Marxism. Today he is known primarily for his existentialist philosophy, so in the next section, I will discuss his most famous novel, Nausea before I discuss his philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness. Later I will talk about his philosophy of existentialism before I tell you 10 philosophical secrets we can learn from his life and work. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre Sartre’s first and most famous book, Nausea, is a philosophical novel published in 1938. It tells the story of a disillusioned, lonely historian

named Antoine Roquentin who believes that inanimate objects and the noise of external events make it impossible for him to define himself or have any independent thoughts. In other words, he cannot separate himself as an autonomous entity or being. This impasse or intellectual paralysis gives him a feeling of nausea, hence the title. Antoine has been living alone in Bouville, modelled on a city in Normandy, where Sartre lived, for the past three years as he is trying to complete his research on an 18th-century politician. He’s depressed. Not only that he doesn’t have a job, lives in somewhat

poverty and has little human contact. Quote: “Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) His only preoccupation is his research on some obscure 19th century aristocrat who is long dead. So you could say his life is not going well. But during one winter, he experiences something bizarre. He’s so bored that it makes him feel nauseated. To escape his boredom and depression, he tries to spend time with others

but it doesn’t help. He slowly starts to doubt his own existence. Here we go back to the 16th century when Rene Descartes, the famous rationalist philosopher, carried out a thought experiment in which he doubted his own existence and then concluded that even if he didn’t exist at all, the fact that he could doubt his own existence, it confirms that he does exist. So the famous philosophical experiment has given us the famous line: I think, therefore I am. Here’s a quote from Nausea: “My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think…

and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.”—Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) Sartre is interested in the bigger picture so instead of telescopic character development, the downs and ups of a hero’s journey, he takes a microscopic approach in tackling the most pressing issue of existence itself. How life itself makes us feel nauseated. He’s a modern man afflicted with a modern illness. It’s meaninglessness or nihilism that makes him

sick. Quote: “Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) In other words, the modern condition is when god truly dies inside us and the decomposition of god in our psyche makes us nauseated or sick. The same theme of nihilism appears in Dostoevsky’s, Camus’s novels as well as in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s human becoming is very much part of Sartre’s character. Quote: “He

is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) In an attempt to understand, Antoine keeps a diary of his nausea. But things get worse as days turn to weeks as his sensation is often overwhelming. He writes everything, including the list of objects he comes across. At one point, he looks himself in the mirror thinking he’s the 19th century politician he’s writing a book about. In other words, he doubts if he’s really real or the ghost of the past. Thinking about the past suddenly gives him

an insight that his feeling of nausea has something to do with his existence. Quote: “The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea). In other words, his whole existence is like feeling sick and nauseated. Here is another quote: “The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am

the one who is within it.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) He realises that the very reason for his existence is to think, research, and write about the past. Quote: “I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

(Nausea). In other words, apart from his goal of writing a book about the 19th century politician, there is no meaning in his life. He has no friends or family. He has nothing else. It’s the reason he moved to this town in the first place. It’s the reason he wakes up every morning to write. It’s the reason he keeps on living. In other words, he is totally detached from the present. This alienation from others or detachment, while good for Buddhists, makes him feel sick. This revelation happens in front of a chestnut tree which is a famous

scene, like Newton’s apple tree which allowed him to discover gravity for the first time. For Sartre, the chestnut tree allows his character to discover the emptiness of existence, the seed of existentialism. A chestnut tree has no essence and it is only us human observers who assign certain characteristics such as taste, smell, colour, weight to it. In other words, objects do not project or offer meaning for themselves. Their meaning only exists inside the observer, i.e. human’s consciousness. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon us, the conscious being, to create meaning for ourselves too. So life is just our chance

to make something of ourselves, define our colour, taste, smell, and overall identity. So Sartre’s protagonist discovers a simple yet revolutionary concept that existence precedes essence. In other words, life comes first and the meaning of it afterward. There is no god or divine essence inside us from birth. We just made it up. This epiphany gives him the liberating feeling he’s been waiting for for days and weeks. For the first time, he is free. At least inside his head. He tries to explain this to others including an ex-girlfriend and a man in a cafe, but neither of

them seems to understand what he’s talking about. He abandons his history research and decides to live in the present. He also decides to move to Paris and write a novel, perhaps because his discovery is easier explained through fiction. Unlike Dostoevsky who favoured the resurrection of god back to life to counter nihilism, Sartre sees the death of god as an opportunity for us to create meaning for ourselves. While Nietzsche considered a very select bunch of humans such as artists and philosophers capable of creating values, Sartre, a socialist and a democrat, tries to offer the opportunity to

everyone to define their own lives. Instead of relying on gods, it’s our responsibility to make our own essence. There is fierce debate as to whether Nausea is a philosophy text or a novel. Whether it’s artistic or philosophical. It appears that Sartre wrote this novel in response to Celine’s masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night, published some 6 years before, which is very bleak and despairing but also incredibly artistic and was immensely successful in the 1930s. So Sartre ends the novel on a positive note because he wanted to liberate us from the despair of modern

empty existence, depicted in Kafka’s novels of alienation and despair as well as Celine’s novels. Sartre also makes a political statement that we are responsible to change ourselves as well as society and history. As a Marxist, he wanted to give people hope that we have the freedom to change things. Sartre also considered humanism problematic because it assumed a universality of all humans having the same rational faculty. In other words humanism is similar to religion in assuming that we are preinstalled with some essence from birth. For Sartre individual choice came first. Another point of contention with humanism

is that Sartre thinks humanists pedestalises certain humans as being better humans than others. Certain humans can become sages or superhuman as Nietzsche pointed out in his ubermensch theory. For Sartre everything or every value or norm is man-made, therefore nothing is sacred. His anti-establishment and anti-tradition views made him very popular among young people who felt alienated by society so they wanted topple statues and break with all traditions, especially in university campuses. Another important novel to compare it to is Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, in which Proust actually saw bits and pieces of our

own past stored in objects. For Proust, our senses allow us to reclaim our past selves stored in certain food, music, or even solid objects. Sarte, who politically was very much against Proust for not speaking out about the war, wanted to remove us from the objects. Proust says that we are like animals that urinate on rocks, trees and bushes, leaving pieces of themselves for others to notice, but also for ourselves when we return to those objects. For humans, our sense of smell, taste and touch involuntarily takes us back to a piece of ourselves in the past

that we had forgotten. For instance, you smell a food or listen to a song, you’re suddenly transported to your past life. Sartre, however, says, this Proustian notion that we exist outside, in objects and people, makes us feel sick and nauseated. Quote: “Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) It takes away our freedom and

sense of autonomy. So Sartre tries to give us freedom but most crucially responsibility to claim our existence as ours. It’s our job to make something of it. Do not rely on others or objects to define you. Only you can define yourself. Only you can carry the load of your existence. Do not engrave yourself on some rock. Or trees because they don’t care and don’t keep you. Only by taking the responsibility of our existence, we can fight nihilism and despair. Sartre’s character finds his essence hanging in trees or such objects on the outside. In some way

it is similar to Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time in which the protagonist’s memories or sense of being are triggered by sensory information in the objects he encounters. In other words, we store part of our being in the objects or people or relationships we experience and when we see those objects, people we remember bits and pieces of our own past lives. While Proust sees it as beautiful and artistic, Sartre, however, sees it as nauseating because our existence can only be meaningful by external objects. In other words, we do not have an essence. Everything is

on the outside. In Nausea, Sartre formulated his central existentialist philosophy that existence comes first and essence is built upon it. From a religious and even philosophical point of view, our essence or humanity comes first, but Sartre reverses it. We exist, therefore we acquire an essence of who we are. In other words, we are born as a clean slate and as we grow up, we become someone. We have the freedom to carve a statue of our own being. By the end of the novel, the protagonist’s nothingness or emptiness liberates him to create his own meaning. But

this comes at a price, now he is responsible for his actions and choices. Also Sartre saw Proust as a snob bourgeois man who lived in bad faith or an inauthentic life that relied on social status more than their achievement. I have to disagree. I think Proust was a genius artist who as snobbish as he was, was also a fantastic writer, producing one of the most beautiful novels of the 20th century. For Proust, the biggest enemy of man was not nihilism but time. Time makes us feel empty because we foresee our demise long before we die.

No matter how much you take responsibility, you have nothing against the slow decay or decomposition of life through time. While Proust acknowledges human nature, at least biological facts such as physiological sensory organs influencing our memory of being. Sartre however, appears to deny human nature by bundling it with god and the unconscious and then rejecting them all. In other words, since there is no god, we have the total freedom to be who we want to be. There is the implication that you can also change your biological nature. If not in reality, at least inside your head.

Subjectivity and objectivity runs at the heart of the novel. Humans as conscious beings shine lights on objects, a Kantian torch-like mental structure which allows us to understand, organise and categorise the outside world. But Sartre, just like Nietzsche, thinks the human itself is not a solid being, instead constantly becoming or changing. So the concrete external world is like an anchor that we try to keep ourselves afloat and stable. So the self is like a floating ghost that tries to become solidified as a self. So outside objects are like a gyroscope that keeps us stable.This instability of

being, for Sartre, is freedom to make whatever you like to be but also destruction as it causes anxiety as Kierkegaard pointed out a century before Sartre. In fact it was Kierkegaard who said that freedom causes us dizziness and anxiety. As we know, dizziness is associated with nausea so Sartre’s title and main idea in this novel can be traced back to Kierkegaard. Having the free choice causes us anxiety as seen in choice paralysis. For example, what video to watch on YouTube or Netflix. So to sum up, Nausea tells the story of a man confronted with his

own existence for the first time which not only terrifies him but also makes him nauseated and sick. But he does come out of it liberated to become whoever he wanted to become. He was in charge, nobody else. No god or human nature or society. Only him. Him alone. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre Published in 1943, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is considered a cornerstone of the philosophy of existentialism. If Nausea is his most important fictional work, this is his most non-fictional book. While in a German prison in the 1940s, away from

all the fightings, Sartre sat down and read one of the most difficult philosophical books, Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, in which the German philosopher settled on the idea of death giving life a meaning it lacks. In other words, to be authentically alive, one must fully realise death. So Sartre wrote his book in reaction to Heidegger but most crucially in response to the religious notion that we are created by god. Sartre says, no, we are nothing prior to our birth or being. We are born first, and then we become something that has an essence.

We have no divine essence or divine creator. Like a flower, we germinate, grow and blossom to become a flower, but nobody plants us, we are self-made. Sartre also responds to the psychoanalysis movement led by Sigmund Freud who argued that beneath the conscious mind, there is a whole new and hidden world called the unconscious mind where all sorts of suppressed emotions, repressed urges and thoughts are kept. According to psychoanalysts such as Freud and Carl Jung, the unconscious is a much bigger pot than the conscious mind. In other words, we are only aware of a fraction of

what’s going on inside our minds. Sartre says that is rubbish. He argues that we do not have a hidden self floating in the unconscious cave or soup, but we are what we know. Anything we are not conscious of is not us. So Sartre agrees with Rene Descartes, I think, therefore I am. But unlike Descartes, Sartre doesn’t believe in innate knowledge from birth. For Sartre existence precedes essence. We are born, and then we develop the self. Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher, was Sartre’s teacher at one point. Husserl’s philosophy, called phenomenology, argues that our consciousness is always

conscious of something. When we know something, we know something, an object or idea or an image. This goes back to Kant who divided knowledge into two: the world of phenomena which is knowable through our animal senses and perception, and noumena which is the unknowable world of things in themselves. So phenomenology is the philosophy of consciousness through the world of phenomena that we get to know through our senses, which removes or ignores the unknowables such as god or afterlife or even the psychoanalytical hidden unconscious posited by Freud. So for Sartre, our consciousness is rooted in objects,

not some divine essence or hidden unconscious. So Sartre says consciousness is tied to objects. It doesn’t come from itself and neither from god. But Sartre also adds that not only consciousness allows us to be aware of the world, but consciousness is also aware of itself as a kind of transparent phenomenon. Not only is it aware of objects but simultaneously it’s aware of this awareness. It knows that it knows. It’s like a camera that can see but also knows that it can see. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre starts with nothingness as the basis of existence, then

moves on to how we fill this void with social role or fake identity and finally he also rejects psychoanalysis of Freud. But first, what’s nothingness. To Understand Nothingness let’s imagine an object we call Mr Self who bumps into objects and obstacles like rocks in space. Through these random collisions, it shapes itself into something. Quote: “Nothingness carries being in its heart.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. To understand Sartre, let’s go back to Martin Heidegger. The German philosopher said that our existence can be summed up by two ends: birth and death. So we exist in time. In other words, our life

is finite meaning we have limited time as a being. So being and time are two sides of the same coin so to speak. One cannot separate existence from time. Sartre takes this as a starting point and then just focuses on the being itself, but instead of talking about time, he shifts his focus to nothingness. Since we have no divine essence or purpose, we exist as nothing. In other words our nothingness makes us totally free to float around. But this nothing being has to deal with the external world, such as objects and other people, which curtail

our freedom. Through our interactions with the world and other people, we have to make choices, which limits our freedom but also causes us to feel anxiety. To escape these constraints or this limit on our freedom, we escape into our imagination, or rely on someone else for guidance or defer authority to a figure such as god to make choices for us. In other words, existence is like walking in the wilderness that’s full of dangers and pitfalls which limit our freedom so to escape this non-freedom we seek answers in our mind, by imagining things or inventing things.

This often leads us to act unconsciously or take roles in life or take refuge within an identity given to us, like nationality, job, activist etc like some flushed out characters in a novel. I’m a YouTuber because I want to fill the void of my existence. We take on roles in order to escape our anguish for the lack of choices but also for the abundance of choices we experience. So since we are sandwiched between an unbridled imagination or thought and tightly constrained world and regulated actions, we develop a sense of self. In other words, the self

is created by free thoughts floating in nothingness, colliding with the unfree outside world of existence. Hence we are beings in nothingness. A good analogy might be a planet. It started as a misshapen rock floating about, until it lost its edges through gravity or collisions with other objects in space and took a more spherical shape and found a stable orbit in which it can exist. Although, for Sartre, humans are different because we exist, not like an object-in-itself like a rock or a tree, but we also exist for-itself, which means we are also our aware of our

existence. To escape this awareness, we take a role, like a teacher, which means we exist in-itself. In other words, we fulfil a role, which means we exist for others, not for ourselves. But we can never fully become a thing in-itself. We can only manage it for a time and we have to convince ourselves to be a teacher, a thing in-itself. In an attempt to become a teacher, a Frenchman or a YouTuber, we try to convince ourselves to be what we are not. This is bad faith. So we come out of nothingness, but we want to

be something. To fill the void, we almost fake it, which is bad faith. Bad faith, for Sartre simply means living a false existence or self-deception which is also close to a Marxist notion of false consciousness prevalent among the working class who buy into their pride in nationalism or identity as peaceful, moral citizens or good workers which prevent them from rebelling against an exploitative system. Marx wanted all workers to unite to overthrow the system but they rarely did. So he blamed on false consciousness which prevent the workers see themselves as victims. Today, another term often used

is internalised racism or repression in which one goes against their interest in accepting the status quo. For Sartre, bad faith means the negation of existence as a thing for-itself. For example when we take a role or job, we act as if we exist for others or a thing in-itself. A waiter acts as though he or she is someone whose only purpose is to wait. Quote: “Society demands that he limit himself to his function… There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might

escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. In other words, their entire being is reduced to their job. This is also true in terms of social status, nationality, a fan of a sports team etc. For Sartre, humans as sentient beings, we cannot fully become a thing-in-itself, so what we often do is attempt or pretend to be a teacher or a YouTuber, reducing our entire existence to one role. This is bad-faith or self-deception. Why do we do it? It limits our freedom or endless choices we face in life, which is

in a way a coping mechanism, because a defined role or action can calm us down. We don’t have to worry about making choices or mistakes. In other words, endless freedom or choices can paralyse us. To escape bad faith, Sartre says we must accept our existence as what it is, not something that is not. An authentic person has endless choices at any moment as he or she is facing the future, but as a waiter, he or she limits it to one choice which is inauthentic or bad faith. For Sartre, bath faith also includes social norms, moral

values, religious dogmas and legal obligations which limit our existential journey of fulfillment as true authentic beings. While social or moral values are created by others, Sartre also considers thinking too much about our own past as bad faith. We always limit our future projections to what happened to us in the past, so this is also bad faith. If we had a bad romantic experience with one person, we project that onto our future partners, which is a form of bad faith. Proust spent his entire novel talking about the past, in an attempt to regain or recreate his

past selves or lost time. Sartre says that’s living inauthentically because you only see yourself in the past that no longer exists, not now or future. Sartre’s philosophy is a teleologically progressive one, similar to Hegel and Marx, that we are heading towards perfection or completion. Sartre spends large portion of the book talking about sex. He treats sex as a social act, not just as biological or physical. Being for others is another form of bad faith. When we build relationships with others, we tend to limit our freedom for acceptance. Sartre gives the example of a shop mannequin

that we sometimes mistake for a real person. We behave differently when we realise it’s not a person. This shows how much we regulate our behaviour for others, depending on the kind of relationships we have. The closer, the more we curtail our own or their freedom to be for themselves rather for others. So our purpose becomes being for others, not free existence per se. We exist to maintain the happiness of the other. For instance, you do everything to make your partner happy, which Sartre says is nothing but emotional alienation because our entire being is taken hostage

by how they make us feel and how we make them feel. So love is nothing but a bad faith conflict or battleground for control of the other. You want them, and you want them for yourself, and nobody else. No wonder, Sartre had an open relationship with Simone. In reality, Simone didn’t exercise that freedom as much as Sartre did, which perhaps shows that men and women are different on a biological level. Men have millions of sperm ready at any moment while women only have one egg, which dictates the level and intensity of sexual urge among the

sexes. Sartre, however, rejects a biological reason for sex. Sex for Sartre is our attempt to create a completion but upon orgasm you go back to square one. This stems from nothingness and emptiness of existence. You hike up a mountain or jump on a bungee and at the end, it’s never complete. I think Sartre stretches it a bit by saying that there is no biological basis for sex. Evolution doesn’t care about Sartre’s opinion, because he failed to procreate so his genes died with him. But Sartre does make sex different from other basic human urges such as

food and survival, because for sex to happen, you need another person. Unless, you go the DIY route. The third major point in Being and Nothingness is consciousness. For Sartre, our consciousness makes us who we are. Anything we are not conscious of or aware of is not us. This goes against the fundamental point psychoanalysts make that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. The unconscious controls much of our choices and actions in life. According to Sartre, the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud removed the responsibility from his patient by blaming the hidden unconscious for their behaviour. Sartre

argues that there is a paradox in psychoanalysis that relies on patients reporting a hidden world of unconsciousness where repressed emotions are kept. You either know, or don’t know. If you don’t know, how can you repress those emotions, urges and ideas? Repressed emotions hidden in the unconscious is just an excuse according to Sartre. He says if a patient has repressed certain emotions or urges, and they refuse to divulge such unsavoury ideas, on some level they are conscious. So the hidden unconscious theory is flawed. Pretending you don’t know is self-deception for the sake of self-preservation. We lie

so we can avoid responsibility. If we self-censor or hide something in our unconscious, it has to be a conscious decision. You do not hide something that you do not know. We knowingly hide treasure or past mistakes. So for Sartre the theory of the unconscious posited by Freud and Jung is nothing but an excuse to make their patients feel better about their bad choices in life. To sum up, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre, just like Heidegger, makes a distinction between being in-itself like non-conscious phenomena such as a tree or rock and being for-itself like humans. The

difference is that the thing-in-itself exists yet is neither aware of its existence nor has freedom while the thing-for-itself is not only aware of its own existence but also because of this consciousness we are condemned to be free. So Sartre’s existentialism is founded upon nothingness in which existence comes about. Now I will discuss his existentialism in more detail. Philosophy The Greek Philosopher Aristotle said that everyone in the world has a purpose or telos. For instance a pen has a purpose, which is to be used for writing. It was created by a creator for that purpose. In

other words, a pen has an essence to be written with. Plato also put essence before existence, saying that everything in the world is mere shadows of an ideal form that only exists as ideas. In other words, the dominant view was that essence came before existence. But Sartre argues that if you really think about humans, they have no purpose in life. Humans are not created for a particular purpose. Quote: “First of all man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself.”—Jean-Paul Sartre So Sartre rejects both religious and philosophical essentialism by saying that

existence precedes essence. We exist and then earn our essence. It’s not given to us from birth. Of course, if you look at humans from a biological perspective, we have a purpose to continue our species. If you look from a civilisational perspective, we are supposed to carry the torch of our culture. Or for instance for Marx, it was to overthrow capitalism to create an egalitarian utopia. But for Sartre, his focus was on an individual level. As a species, yes we have to continue life or as class to create a more just society but as individuals we

are not created for any specific purpose. An individual’s life is meaningless, empty. Instead of this meaninglessness becoming gloomy or becoming despairing, Sartre says, this emptiness is an amazing opportunity for us to create our own meaning. In other words, the blank slate allows us to draw our own essence or carve our own statue that we are proud of. Quote: “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”—Jean-Paul Sartre The German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his theory of knowledge made a distinction between phenomena, our experience of the

world and noumena, the world in itself which we cannot know. In other words, our knowledge of the world is limited to our experience of the phenomenal world, as a result we cannot know the world in itself. Sartre used the distinction between the phenomena and noumena in a sense to devise his own existential theory. According to Sartre there is a distinction between an object in itself and an object for itself. What’s the distinction? To understand this, let’s look at a pen. A pen is an object in itself. It has a purpose because someone created it for

a specific purpose. It cannot change its purpose. So a pen is an object in itself, it can only react if someone pushes it on paper. It cannot write on its own accord. Now when it comes to humans, Sartre believes we have no creator. In other words, we have no essence. We start from nothingness. Most philosophers in history believed in human essence coming first, so essentialism has been the dominant approach in philosophy. Sartre however, turned it on its head, saying everything starts with existence, so existentialism was born. This blank slate philosophy allows us to carve our

own unique essence. This means we can be like an object-for-itself. Because we are conscious of our existence, we can create our own purpose. Since we are born blank slates, nothingness is our essence so this gives us the chance to become an object for itself. Of course, Sartre understood that a lot of people do not take the opportunity to become who they want to be. Instead most people regress to being like objects in themselves. They react to the world. They either believe in god or other moral authority telling them what to do. To free ourselves from

this state of existence for others, we ought to become active and take initiative to carve a unique self, which means taking responsibility for our own life and our actions. Those who rely on the authority of others, tend to be reactive to the world and often blame others for their misfortunes. They blame their fate. They consider themselves victims. Sartre, instead, wanted people to use their nothingness to create their own essence. In his most influential book, Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that we are born without an essence. In other words, we exist before we become who we

are. Since we do not come pre-assembled as who we are, this gives us the freedom to find our essence. As an atheist, Sartre didn’t believe in the existence of god or a divine creator. He famously said that we are condemned to be free. This freedom allows us to make choices in life. Select certain paths for ourselves. But with this freedom comes… as Uncle Ben said, with responsibility. Sartre read Martin Heidegger’s famous book, Being and Time, in which the German philosopher located human authenticity in our awareness of death. In other words, when we are fully awake

to the idea of death, we can live authentically. The opposite of authentic life would be escaping from the reality of death or lying to ourselves or even trying to distract ourselves from it by focusing on other things and not taking responsibility for our own lives. Sartre has a similar view that our awareness of death can shift our focus from knowing reality to experiencing reality. It makes us choose our actions, and expressions. It’s through our thoughtful actions, we earn our essence of who we are. In other words, we are free in how we act or react

to the outside world. And this freedom comes with the responsibility once we do take steps in life. As conscious beings, we are aware of what we do. Not only that, we are also self-aware of how we feel and perceive ourselves and others. This self-awareness forces us to judge our own actions carefully. Not only that, it also allows us to judge others. Since we judge others, others also judge us. In his 1944 play, No Exit, he famously said that hell is other people. In other words, we are constantly judged by others so we try to present

ourselves that is appealing to others. It becomes even worse after our death, we enter a hell in which others judge you without you being able to defend yourself. Sartre was also influenced by the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, who is considered the first existentialist philosopher. Sartre, however, had a big problem with Kierkegaard, because the Danish philosopher believed in god. Sartre was an atheist. So he turned Kierkegaard’s good faith, a man’s belief in god, on its head and used the negative adjective, bad faith, as denying your own freedom or relying on a divine power to make excuses

for yourself. By giving power to god or another external entity, an individual is losing their autonomy and power to shape their life. Sartre was also aware that denying god gave humans an immense freedom, which can turn nasty for some but creates a lot of anxiety for many. Kierkegaard too was aware that our anxiety for the most part stems from our freedom to make choices. And we have to live with those choices. Sartre also recognised the anguish this freedom causes. But for Sartre to lessen the anxiety of our choices, he argued that each choice we make

should be judged on its own merits. We should not judge someone by their prior history, but on the action in hand. This liberates the individual from their tribal or religious affiliation and past lives and gives the responsibility but most crucially the authority to the individual. Sartre rejected essentialism, a philosophy that gave us human essence we have not control over. From an essentialist perspective, if someone makes a mistake, the entire person is tainted. But Sartre takes a more empirical approach, in that he judges each action in isolation, rather the entirety of the person in question. In

other words, Sartre’s existentialism liberates the individual from their social, historical or religious ties and even their past history. Sartre also uses a Kantian moral imperative to tell the individual to act in a way that if everyone acted in that same way, it would not create chaos. In other words, whatever you do, you should be able to accept everyone else on the planet to be able to do the same. So Sartre believed in a moral universalism. You should treat others in a way you want to be treated by others. However, despite his individualistic philosophy of existentialism,

Sartre always sided with the group ideology of Marxism, and also considered culture as an important cornerstone of a person’s development. His philosophy of existentialism that we can shape our own destiny can be traced back to Hegel and Marx. For both Hegel and Marx, we are the product of history but we can also affect history. Marx famously said that it is our job to change history. Sartre has the same belief that we are capable of changing history and society. He believed in an egalitarian world in which the poor were able to participate in the social and

political sphere as the rich had done for centuries. Despite calling himself an anarchist, his political and philosophical views often contradicted each other. On the one hand he gave the individual the freedom to carve something of themselves and take responsibility, but on the other hand, he was active in social protests and defended the Soviets which curtailed individual freedom in the Soviet Union. He recognised the power of the media and the elite in shaping people’s opinions so in reality not everyone was free to carve an essence of themselves. So he struggled between class identity and individual identity

throughout his life. As a member of bourgeois class and later an influential public figure, he enjoyed far more autonomy than the average French person did. Of course, Sartre’s political involvement can be separated from his philosophy. Now I will discuss ten philosophical lessons and secrets we can learn from Sartre’s writing and life. Lessons Lesson 1: Life’s absurd, so is death. Quote: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. The Wall is a short story by Sartre published in 1939. It tells the story of a prisoner during the

Spanish civil war who is facing the firing squad, hence the title wall symbolises the brutality of life that we all face death at some point. The inmate is told if he confessed to the whereabouts of his comrade, he would be spared from the imminent death penalty. At first he refuses to cooperate thinking what’s the point of life anyway. But at the very last minute, he changes his mind thinking he can fool the police. But there is a twist. He gives the authorities a random address, but as fate would have it, his comrade happens to have

moved into that exact random house. The prisoner’s life is spared from execution but his comrade is shot dead. Sartre shows the absurdity and the randomness of life and death. From our conception, to birth, to going through the trials and tribulations of life as well as our death are all random. Quote: “Death is a continuation of my life without me…”—Jean-Paul Sartre. Lesson 2: Nothingness is an opportunity Quote: “Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. It was Marx

who said that workers have nothing to lose but their chains. Sartre has a similar message but a more existential one. We are born from nothingness into nothingness. In other words, neither god nor society has ordained us with an essence. This emptiness of our existence or the meaninglessness of life is not something to cry about but to celebrate because we have the opportunity to build something of ourselves. Instead of restoring an old house, we can build our own house from scratch. So life has no meaning and it's up to us to give it a meaning. We

are not here because God has put us here. Nor are we here to serve society’s purpose. We are here to carve a path for ourselves. Form an identity of our own and give our lives a meaning. Lesson 3: We are condemned to freedom Quote: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. If you boil down Sartre’s philosophy to one single idea, it is freedom. On a practical level, we have little or no freedom when it comes to bigger decisions in life. We cannot choose

our family, country, name, age, looks, height, culture, language etc. So how can Sartre say that we are condemned to be free? As individuals we are at the mercy of society, the legal system, parents, teachers, history, tradition, morality, religion and god. When you line these authority figures around yourself, you might think we have no freedom. But Sartre argues that on a deeper level, none of those authorities can limit your ability to think freely. It’s in the thought that we are condemned to be free. In fact, Sartre formulated his philosophy while in a German prison. In his

1945 novel, The Age of Reason, told from various characters’ perspectives, the story centres on a teacher who fights society and biology as he doesn’t want to be a father so he’s trying to get money so that his girlfriend can get an abortion. We may face social, political and even biological limitations, but nobody can stop us from imagining anything we want. It’s in our imagination that we are truly condemned to be free because we can imagine the thing that doesn’t exist and we cannot escape our imagination, no matter how terrifying it may be. Lesson 4: Take

responsibility Quote: “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. With freedom comes responsibility is often a cliche. For Sartre, after freedom, responsibility is the most important philosophical doctrine. In a godless world, Sartre says, the true meaning of life is our freedom to take responsibility. In his 1946

essay titled Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre puts the responsibility, not on god or society but on the individual. 18th century European humanism came to replace god with humans, faith with rationality and church with university. In other words, humanism puts humans in charge of the planet, no longer reliant on god or church. While humanism takes a more group-centred or institutional approach, like government, democracy, civil societies etc, Sartre however, puts the responsibility on each individual. Quote: "Their being is not determined, so it is up to everyone to create their own existence, for which they are then responsible.

They cannot not be free, there is a form of necessity for freedom, which can never be given up.” Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism is a Humanism). Just as humanism was an optimistic project to liberate the individuals from the constraints of religion and tradition, for Sartre existentialism, too, is an optimistic philosophy that views the individual as the ultimate maker of himself or herself. We’re free to be who we want to be but also responsible for what may come our way. Lesson 5: Don’t live in bad faith Quote: “Perhaps it's inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing

at all and impersonating what one is.”—Jean-Paul Sartre (Age of Reason). It all sounds good to take responsibility. But when faced with life’s choices, we experience anguish, anxiety and often analysis paralysis hits us, so it is so much easier if others make certain decisions for us. While we all want to be a powerful leader, nobody wants to experience what Hamlet or leaders and parents experience when faced with tough choices. What if we make mistakes? So we often give up our freedom to others, like parents, government, experts, doctors etc to make choices for us. But Sartre says,

if you rely on others or take a role carved for you by others, you live an inauthentic life. He calls it bad faith. You are not genuine. You act in a role created by others. The true faith or authentic self can be created by our actions and mistakes. It is through mistakes we can make something of ourselves. Tackle life’s choices, make mistakes and own up to your mistakes. That’s how you become someone. Don’t hire a sculptor to make you, but it’s through our own actions that we create ourselves and by extension also affect society. We

are the sculptors of our own being. No god is there to help us. So we might as well live our true selves. Not some wacky role society or our company has created for us. Lesson 6: Hell is other people No Exit is a 1944 play that tells the story of a man and two women locked in a waiting room in the afterlife as punishment for their crimes in this life. In other words, they are stuck in their grave without any chance of getting out, but the twist is that now three of them are together waiting

to be tortured. At first the three lie about their crimes. But they all know that everyone is lying so after some arguments, they decide to come clean and confess their true crimes. The man, Joseph Garcin, mistreated his wife but that’s nothing. He was actually executed for cowardice during a war. One of the women, Inèz Serrano, a lesbian, seduced her cousin’s wife by manipulating her which resulted in her cousin getting killed and both women dying through asphyxiation. The other woman, Estelle Rigault, from a wealthy background, was sent to this room because she killed her own child

which resulted in the father of the child taking his own life. As they spend more time together, the sexual tension also rises, resulting in Garcin and Estelle getting close which makes Inez extremely jealous so she mocks him for his cowardice. As expected he attempts to escape once again. After pushing the door violently a few times, it suddenly opens but he’s too ashamed to leave, because the cause of his execution was precisely army desertion. Here he comes to the famous conclusion that “hell is other people.” So much so that despite Estelle’s attempts, Garcin refuses to make

love to her in the presence of another woman. Estelle is so angry that she stabs the other woman who laughs at her saying they’re already dead. Soon they all realise that they’re stuck in the room together for eternity so better they accept their fate and get on with it. In this story Sartre wants to show how we constantly look to ourselves through the eyes of others. For men courage is the most important value and respect is the most important currency so Garcin is forever condemned for being a coward. He cannot rest until someone tells him

that he is not a coward. He was seeking that from Estelle who accepted him but Inez refused. For the women, it was their sexual transgressions that forever condemned in the eyes of others. Society is a mirror that keeps showing us, the good, the bad and the ugly, no matter how much we try to show our good side. Dostoevsky said that consciousness was a disease which Sartre turned into hell is other people. For example as a YouTuber, while I get hundreds of positive comments but one negative one sticks. So despite our individualism, we cannot untangle ourselves

from others so we might accept that hell is other people. Lesson 7: Don’t be a victim Quote: “It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”—Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness). Sartre was short and ugly but he didn’t use it as an excuse. Instead he used his power of the intellect to think and write. In fact, having a handicap should motivate us even more to develop ourselves, hone our craft, offer some social value and push boundaries. Sartre was captured by the Germans so

instead of crying about it or resigning to his fate, he used his time in prison to read a book written by a German, Martin Heidegger, who was very close to the Nazis. No matter where you find yourself, there is always an opportunity to do something that is meaningful for you. In his 1940 essay, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, Sartre argues that while our perception of reality is always limited depending on our angle of view, age and length of time we spend observing things, but when we imagine an object, it appears as a

complete object. Since we can imagine things, Sartre says, we are inherently free. Not only can nobody stop us from imagining things, nobody can stop us from achieving things too. Only we can stop ourselves when we give up and live in bad faith. Lessons 8: Do no live in the past Quote: “People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is a direct attack against the philosophy of essentialism. What’s essentialism? the idea that we are born with an essence. Aristotle said everything has a telos or purpose.

In religions, we are created by god so our essence is also created by god. But Sartre starts with a clean slate argument that we have no essence, only existence. The past only stretches so far because you’re nothing before you were born. Everything started from your own existence. Sartre was a big critique of Marcel Proust whose monumental novel is all about the past. Proust writes how we leave bits and pieces of ourselves in the past as we age. But Sartre also responds to psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who focused too much on the past

individual and collective memories. For Sartre the past is the past and what matters is now and the future. Interestingly Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night, questioned that future progress is nothing but sacrificing yourself for others you don’t know. So Sartre as a Marxist focused his energy on the future. So dealing too much in the past can distract us from the present and most importantly from the future. It’s not important which path you have traversed, but the path you’re going now. Lesson 9: You cannot ignore the past While Sartre’s philosophy is very

optimistic about the future, he failed to credit our cultural past. Sartre learnt from those who came before him. His influential book Being and Nothingness is inspired by but also a direct response to Heidegger’s book Being and Time. So while existentialism liberates us from religious dogmas or traditional constraints to make something of ourselves, we cannot ignore our cultural past. Friedrich Nietzsche, who was also an existentialist, acknowledged that we build upon the works of those who came before us. His ubermensch goes though a camel stage in which he slaves to learn his skills from others. We don’t

always start from zero. So while Sartre was a brilliant philosopher, he failed to respect our cultural past and gave free rein to some individuals to destroy whatever came before. Today social justice warriors topple statues, cancel people and boycott comedians or anyone who disagrees with them. While Sartre would have been outraged by them, his philosophy allows such behaviour because we are supposed to build on nothingness. Lesson 10: We cannot ignore biology Quote: “It is disgusting—Why must we have bodies?”—Jean-Paul Sartre. Being such a short and ugly man, I feel his pain. But you cannot ignore biology. Sartre

says neither god nor biology has given us a purpose. We are born out of accident and chance. The only purpose out there is the one we choose. Just like Marx, Sartre ignores Darwinian evolution and to some extent human nature. Sartre’s starting point is nothingness that we have no essence prior to existence. But I think he neglects our essence on a DNA level. While we may not have our individual self from birth, we do have a DNA fingerprint that shapes our height, nose, eye colour, and some other traits. These are extremely important in our lives. But

Sartre operates not on a physiological level but on consciousness level. He also rejects psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious determining who we are. Sartre’s philosophy operates totally on a conscious level. In other words, Sartre gives the human rational faculty too much credit. In reality, however, we are quite irrational when it comes to important decisions in life. For instance the urge to have sex and have children is extremely strong in us and Schopenahuer understood that it’s irrational and controlled by the blind will within us. I guess Sartre tries to wake us up that our purpose is not

to continue life, so he had sex for pleasure not to make babies. While men and women have very similar intellectual capacity, the way we view the opposite gender is extremely different. In fact his open relationship with Simone de Beauvoir shows that. While Sartre was having sex with multiple women, Simone didn’t have the same thirst for sex with other men. While Sartre was perhaps aware of such things, he made light of biological hardwiring that we may not be able to change. While today people are free to change their life, identity, gender, nationality etc., Sartre’s philosophy is

a little too optimistic when it comes to creating our own identity to whatever we want. In reality, a lot of what we do is pre-determined by our biology. Sartre himself didn’t define himself within a single day or month or year, it took him years and years to become what he was. He dedicated years of hard work to become a philosopher and a writer. Today, we all want quick solutions and shortcuts. Unfortunately, those quick fixes and shortcuts may help us in the meantime, they may not be the answer in the long-run. While the Instagram filter makes

me very beautiful, I cannot ignore the ugly dude I see in the mirror every morning. Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism liberates us from god, tradition, societal norms and values which we sometimes take for granted. But being free comes with a huge responsibility. I think in today’s world, we all like freedom but we rarely like taking accountability for our actions and the consequences of our actions. Just as freedom is empowering, taking responsibility is even more empowering because it makes you think on how best to sculpt your own life. You’re the artist of your own existence. Nobody

else. Being alive is a precious opportunity and it’s our responsibility to carve a beautiful existence out of it. What do you think? Leave a comment down below. Merci Beaucoup Thank you for watching.