French Philosopher, Proposer of the Existentialist "Existence Precedes Essence"
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French philosopher and writer, the most important representative of atheistic existentialism, who proposed the core thesis of "existence precedes essence": unlike a tool (whose maker first gives it a functional "essence," then produces its "existence"), a human being first "exists" in the world and only thereafter shapes his own "essence" through his own free choices — there is no preset human nature or divine will to prescribe what a person ought to become; a human being is "condemned to freedom" and must bear the full responsibility for each of his choices. This philosophical stance profoundly answered the widespread crisis of meaning in postwar Western society. He also threw himself into left-wing political activity, and in 1964 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but actively declined to accept it, holding that a writer should accept no institutionalized honor.
Sartre held that human beings have no innate, predestined nature by which to escape the responsibility of choice — "man is free, man is freedom itself… man is condemned to be free." Even to choose not to choose is itself a choice, and one can never escape bearing responsibility for one’s own existence.
In 1964 Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but actively wrote to the Swedish Academy to decline it, on the grounds that a writer should not let himself be institutionalized and alienated by any institutional system of honors — a stance highly consistent with the existentialist philosophy he always stressed of individual free choice and refusal to be defined by external authority.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
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