Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic existentialism: Radical freedom and encountering the Other

Today we’ll be talking about Sartre and his version of an atheistic existentialism. There’s a difficulty in understanding Sartre that we don’t find in Kierkegaard, and it lies in Sartre’s use of seemingly incompatible philosophers and philosophies. We find Sartre trying to combine Descartes, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and later Marx. Raymond Aron, a famous philosopher of Sartre’s generation and Sartre’s intellectual enemy, said of Sartre: “you can’t be a follower of Kierkegaard and a follower of Marx at the same time.” But this is precisely what Sartre tried to do in combining individual freedom and socialism in a coherent philosophical doctrine. And for the record, I think you can absolutely combine all kinds of concepts and traditions, but that’s a different topic.

I won’t be talking about Sartre’s socialism this evening. I’ll instead restrict myself to talking about how Sartre analyzes the self in relation to itself, the world, and other selves. What I want to emphasize is that for Sartre, the self is always a unity, and that unity is accounted for by the ontological structure of consciousness. The consequence of this position is fundamentally ethical: even when there’s self-deception going on, even when the world seems to be determining a self’s actions, even when others are constituting the self’s world, the self is fully responsible for being itself.

Sartre tries to reveal the structure and conditions of selfhood or subjectivity, arguing that this structure and these conditions are ontologically primary—that is, they’re what make the world and human life possible. He turns to the thinkers I just mentioned to find and employ conceptual tools to argue for this position.

Descartes: The absolute truth of the Cogito

From Descartes, Sartre takes what he calls the “absolute truth,” which is Descartes’ principle “I think, therefore I am.” Simply put, for Sartre, Descartes revealed that if you remove consciousness from thought about being, you lose both thought and being in vicious cycles of skeptical doubt. Descartes argued that I can doubt the existence, the being, of anything, including what I’m thinking and who’s thinking, but the one thing I can’t doubt is my existence when I think. My existence is firmly and absolutely implied in thinking.

So, first-person consciousness takes the form of primary existence, and from it are derived both the objects of consciousness and the I in its specific identity. Sartre rejects, however, Descartes’ dualism—the idea that the ego, the thinking I, is a substance radically separated from the body, the material substance. In that sense, you can’t locate the ego, or the self, anywhere as if you would a thing, whether material like a rock or abstract like an ideal geometrical figure. The self in consciousness isn’t a separate substance. It’s the totality or unity or synthesis of a human being.

Husserl: The phenomenological method and intentionality

Here Sartre turns to Husserl. From Husserl, Sartre takes the so-called phenomenological method, which basically says that you can arrive at the primary structure of consciousness by analyzing consciousness without paying any regard to its specific content, like mental states or representations of particular objects. What you find with this method is that consciousness is always a first-person perspective about something other than itself. It is, in Husserl’s terminology, “intentional.” Sartre uses the word intentional in this sense, but he also uses “positional” or “thetic” with pretty much the same meaning.

Sartre departs from Husserl in saying that what also marks consciousness as intentional is that its object is always transcendent—that is, it transcends the consciousness of it. The object as it were exceeds consciousness of it.

This might seem to go against the idea of human reality being fully within or immanent within subjectivity. But actually, if consciousness is defined as first-person subjectivity or perspective, then to say that consciousness is perspective is to commit to the position that there are other such perspectives. And if there are other such perspectives, that commits you to the position that the object of these perspectives will exceed any particular perspective. In being the object of countless consciousnesses or perspectives, the object is transcendent.

Sartre also departs from Husserl in seeing consciousness, subjectivity, as necessarily constituted by its relations to other subjectivities. We’ll return to this when we discuss the encounter with the Other.

Hegel: In-itself and For-itself

Hegel becomes very useful for Sartre in discussing the transcendence of objects. From Hegel, Sartre finds a way to divide being into two distinct ontological regions—separate, but in the same world, and so inherently related to each other.

On the one hand, there is the in-itself (en soi), which is the object not reducible to the appearances that consciousness reveals. The in-itself is self-identical, determined, the world in its nakedness, so to speak. It is what it is, nothing more. In Sartre’s novel Nausea, the protagonist encounters the in-itself when he perceives the roots of a chestnut tree, not being able to do anything else with this encounter. In encountering it in its nakedness, there are no words, no meanings, no relations that could be attached to it. It is already full, so to speak.

On the other hand, there is the for-itself (pour-soi), which is non-self-identical, non-determined, the region of human being, which is the region of appearances of objects. The for-itself isn’t something ontologically distinct from the objects apprehended, because the appearances of the in-itself belong to the world in the mode of the for-itself, in the mode of appearances—they are in-itself for-itself. The for-itself reveals the in-itself because it is consciousness. Please give this some thought, I promise it’ll start making some sense.

Heidegger: Phenomenology as ontology

Like Heidegger, Sartre argues that phenomenology is ontology, the philosophy of being, of the primary aspects of being. Consciousness reveals objects. It’s intentional, always about or of something that is not itself. But it reveals objects that in-themselves don’t need to be revealed for their existence. A tree has no need to appear for consciousness for its being—it’s already determined in-itself. So, Sartre concludes: “consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself.”

And here we find why Sartre thinks that man is fundamentally alienated, which he expresses by saying that I am what I am not: that is, I am—a for-itself, a nothingness, a freedom—what I am not—an in-itself, a determined physical body, and a determined past history. So, no matter what I’ve done in the past, what job I have, what I’ve thought, what I want, what I believe, I’m not that, in the sense that what underpins all of that is a radical possibility, or what Sartre calls a nothingness (néant).

Sartre also says I am not what I am: that is, I am not—what I’m intending, what I’m doing, what I’m committed to now—what I am—again a radical possibility which is inescapable in every determination, every moment of “I am.”

Kierkegaard: The contradictory synthesis

The type of alienation Sartre is talking about stems from Kierkegaard’s philosophy and its insistence on seeing the self as a contradictory, disjunctive synthesis or unity between possibility (the for-itself) and necessity (the in-itself).

The insights Sartre finds in Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard lead him to posit the principle that existence precedes essence.

This is a blow against pretty much all philosophies that argue that human beings have a nature, a set of essences, which are to be realized through actions, behavior, following authority, and the like.

Here Sartre distinguishes himself from both religion, which argues that man is fundamentally an essence, a plan in God’s mind, and from humanist essentialism like Enlightenment philosophy or Marxism, which argues that man has essences as a natural being which he is to realize by fully developing his reason or by entering into a harmonious relationship with the world of nature.

For Sartre, the human being first exists in this world, is thrown into the world, as nothingness. And it’s only then that the human being defines itself. The human being defines itself, makes itself—it is not defined or made once it’s thrown out into the world.

Sartre tries to capture these two aspects of human being by saying that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he or she didn’t choose existence or freedom, but free, because once a human being exists he or she can’t escape freedom. In being free, in being a nothingness that determines itself in a world already determined, the human being is fully responsible for itself.

Not only that—the human being is fully responsible for all other human beings as well. Why? Because when we create ourselves in concrete situations, we always create an ideal type of how human beings ought to act, and that ideal is valid for everyone in a certain historical context.

For example, I want undocumented immigrants to be given more rights, and by wanting this, I want other people to want it too.

But inversely, someone else wants undocumented immigrants to be deported, and that person will want everyone to want that too.

In choosing for myself, I choose for humanity. That is a mighty proposition.

Let me now try to explain in more detailed, philosophical terms how Sartre argues for his position about the structure of consciousness. Sartre distinguishes between two modes of consciousness: non-positional (or non-thetic) consciousness and positional (or thetic) consciousness.

Non-positional consciousness

Non-positional consciousness is consciousness that is not directed at an object. It’s what Sartre calls “pre-reflective” consciousness. This is consciousness that is aware of itself without making itself an object. When I’m absorbed in reading a book, for example, I’m not consciously thinking “I am reading.” Yet there is a sense in which I’m aware that I’m reading—otherwise I couldn’t later remember that I was reading.

This pre-reflective self-awareness is the foundation of all consciousness. It’s not a separate act of reflection but rather the very structure of consciousness itself. Consciousness is always conscious of itself without making itself an object of consciousness.

Positional consciousness

Positional consciousness, on the other hand, is consciousness directed at an object. When I look at a tree, my consciousness is positionally directed at the tree. The tree is the object of my consciousness. This is what we normally think of as consciousness—consciousness of something.

But even positional consciousness presupposes non-positional consciousness. When I’m consciously looking at the tree, I’m also pre-reflectively aware that I’m looking at the tree. The two modes are inseparable.

Consciousness as nothingness

Sartre’s crucial claim is that consciousness is nothingness. What does this mean? Consciousness is not a thing among things. It has no essence, no determinate nature. It’s pure openness to the world, pure intentionality. As Sartre puts it, consciousness is “what it is not and is not what it is.”

This nothingness is what makes freedom possible. Because consciousness has no fixed nature, it’s always free to transcend its past, its situation, its determinations. No matter what I’ve been, what I’ve done, what’s happened to me, I’m always free to choose how to relate to these facts, how to interpret them, how to project myself into the future.

One of Sartre’s most famous concepts is bad faith (mauvaise foi). Bad faith is a form of self-deception, but it’s not ordinary lying. When I lie to someone else, I know the truth and deliberately conceal it. But in bad faith, I’m trying to deceive myself about my own freedom and responsibility.

Bad faith involves believing contradictory things about oneself. It’s trying to be both a free, self-creating consciousness (for-itself) and a fixed, determined thing (in-itself). We want to have the stability and definition of a thing while also maintaining our freedom.

The waiter example

Sartre gives the famous example of a waiter in a café. The waiter’s gestures are a bit too precise, a bit too quick. He comes toward the customers with a step a bit too quick, he bends forward a bit too eagerly, his voice and eyes express an interest a bit too solicitous for the customer’s order.

What’s happening here? The waiter is playing at being a waiter. He’s trying to coincide with his social role, to be a waiter in the way that an inkwell is an inkwell. But he can’t succeed. Unlike the inkwell, which simply is what it is (lacking consciousness), the waiter is always more than his role. He’s a consciousness, a freedom, who happens to be working as a waiter.

The waiter is in bad faith because he’s trying to deny his freedom, trying to become identical with his social role. He wants to believe “I am a waiter” in the same way a stone is a stone. But this is impossible. He is a waiter only in the mode of not being one—that is, he freely takes up this role, and he could always choose to stop.

The woman on a date example

Sartre gives another example: a woman on a first date. Her companion takes her hand. She knows what this gesture means—it’s a move toward intimacy. But she doesn’t want to acknowledge this directly. She doesn’t want to have to make a decision about whether to accept or reject his advance.

So what does she do? She leaves her hand there, but she treats it as a thing, as if it were not part of her. She engages in intellectual conversation, talking about life, philosophy, showing she is spiritual and not merely physical. Meanwhile, her hand rests passively in his, as if it were a mere object, not connected to her consciousness and will.

This is bad faith, according to Sartre. She’s trying to be both consciousness (engaged in high-minded conversation) and thing (the passive hand). She’s trying to avoid her freedom, her responsibility to choose whether to accept or reject the advance.

The structure of bad faith

Bad faith is possible because human reality has a peculiar structure. We’re both facticity (our given situation, our past, our body, our social roles) and transcendence (our freedom to transcend all of this, to project ourselves into the future). We are both being-in-itself (determined, factual) and being-for-itself (free, indeterminate).

Bad faith exploits this duality.

It emphasizes one aspect while denying the other. Sometimes we pretend we’re purely free, denying our facticity (”I could be anything I want!”). Sometimes we pretend we’re purely determined, denying our freedom (”I had no choice, it’s just who I am”).

But the truth is we’re always both.

We’re condemned to be free, thrown into a situation we didn’t choose, yet free to choose how we respond to that situation. Bad faith is the attempt to escape this uncomfortable truth.

Sadness and emotion

Sartre applies this analysis even to emotions. Consider sadness. What is sadness? Sartre says: it’s “the intentional unity which comes to reassemble and animate the totality of my conduct.” It’s the meaning of my dull look with which I view the world, of my bowed shoulders, of my lowered head, of the listlessness in my whole body.

But at the very moment I adopt each of these modes of behavior, don’t I know that I could also not adopt them? Being sad means to make oneself sad. It doesn’t matter where I receive the sadness from—whether from external events or internal states. A consciousness affects itself with sadness and is sad.

We’re in bad faith about emotions when we say “I can’t help how I feel” or “The sadness came over me.” Yes, there are circumstances that occasion sadness. But I’m always choosing, at some level, to be sad—to adopt the postures, the perspective, the comportment of sadness. This doesn’t mean sadness isn’t real or genuine. It means I’m responsible for it.

So far we’ve discussed consciousness in relation to itself and to the world of things. But there’s a third dimension: consciousness in relation to other consciousnesses. This is where Sartre’s analysis becomes most powerful and most disturbing.

The look

The encounter with the Other reveals a different ontological structure, more than the for-itself we’ve discussed. It reveals my being-for-others—my being without being-for-me.

The best example is shame. Shame is non-positional self-consciousness, conscious of itself as shame. It’s intentional, directed at something—me. I’m ashamed of what I am. This has the same structure as consciousness we’ve discussed before. It discloses an intimate relation of myself to myself, because I discover an aspect of my being, and have to engage with it.

But primarily, shame is shame before somebody. I make a vulgar gesture. If no one notices, I’m not ashamed. It’s only when someone notices that I’m ashamed. The shame here is not reflective. As Sartre says: “The Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.”

Just by appearing in front of the Other, I judge myself as object, for that is how I appear to the Other. I recognize that I AM as the Other sees me. The Other establishes in me “a new type of being,” “new qualifications.” This wasn’t there as mere potentiality. The Other is both the witness capable of grasping meaning in its totality and the one who creates this meaning. Yet “I am responsible for it.”

Shame is shame of oneself before the Other. These two structures are inseparable.

The keyhole example

Sartre gives a vivid example. A man, jealous or curious or whatever, looks through a keyhole to look at a woman. At this moment, he is pure consciousness. He is non-thetic self-consciousness—there is no self to which he can refer, evaluate, or give meaning to qualify his acts. He just is his acts. There are only ends and means. The keyhole, his looking—these don’t exist for themselves. They exist only in relation to a free project of his possibilities. The possibility is jealousy, which organizes everything. He is this jealousy. He doesn’t know it as an object—he simply lives it.

The situation has a double inverted determination. The spectacle to be seen behind the door exists only because he’s jealous. But his jealousy is nothing except that there is a sight to be seen through the door. This is the unity of facticity (the world as given) and freedom (his free project). He has no definition of himself. He is what he is not, and he is not what he is. He is nothingness.

But then—there are footsteps in the hall. He hears them. What does this mean? Essential modifications to his being appear by simply hearing an Other.

First, he realizes he exists for himself as unreflective consciousness. Now he sees himself, because the Other sees him.

Second, his unreflective consciousness becomes consciousness of the world, but a transformed world. The self is apprehended only as object for the Other. He is conscious of himself as escaping himself. His foundation is outside himself.

Third, he feels shame. He lives it but doesn’t know it as an object. He is this self which another knows, in a world the Other has made alien to him.

Fourth, what relations does he enter? A relation of being—he is this being. There’s no denying it.

Fifth, each of his acts is now in a new setting. The material of his being is the unpredictable freedom of the Other. But he claims it as his own. He is conferred a being, and he recognizes it. He is now a thing, a nature, an in-itself-for-another. But because he’s this for a freedom, his nature escapes him.

The Other’s look solidifies his possibilities, gives them to him, alienates them from him. The Other might call the police. He might have a weapon. He might do anything. The situation escapes the man at the keyhole. It’s the hidden death of his possibilities. In principle, this escapes him.

The park example

Sartre gives another example (by the way, as philosophers: always give examples!). Imagine you’re in a public park. There’s a lawn and along the edge, there are benches. A man passes by. You see him both as object and as man at the same time.

If he were only an object, his relation to other things would be of an additive type. He could disappear and the objects around wouldn’t change perceptibly. Through him, no new relations would emerge in the universe of your things. From his viewpoint, things would be a plurality of indifferent relations—he would just be an element in a causal order.

But you see him as a man. This means the lawn unfolds starting from him and extending toward him in “a synthetic emergence of a unilateral relation.” The objects are no longer grouped toward you. They flee from you toward him.

You know the object (the man), but at the same time he fully escapes you. You’re not the center of his world. He disintegrates the relations you apprehend between things in your universe. Thus, he is “an element of disintegration” which appears in your universe. He’s an object which has “stolen the world from me.”

Everything is still there, but everything is congealed, moves away from you toward this new object. It’s a decentralization which undermines the centralization you’re simultaneously effecting. The world “has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being and it is perpetually flowing off through this hole.”

But this can’t be the whole story. The Other can’t just be defined as that which sees what I see. My fundamental connection with the Other must refer back to my being-seen-by-the-Other. This is what Sartre calls “being-seen-by-another.” The Other is an “internal hemorrhage” of my universe, a flow of it. This is revealed to me in my flight toward objectivation. And it’s there in everyday life, not just as an abstract truth. I am always looked at by the Other.

What is the look?

What is the look? It’s not just two ocular globes facing my direction, right? Even when branches rustle, footsteps are heard, there’s silence, a movement of a curtain—the look is there. Eyes are merely a support for the look. If I see the look, I don’t perceive eyes, though they’re there as that which presents the look.

The look transforms me. Under the look, I become an object. My freedom is frozen, solidified, given a nature by the Other’s consciousness. I experience myself as seen, as having a determinate character that I didn’t give myself.

This is why Sartre famously says in No Exit: “Hell is other people.” Not because other people are inherently bad, but because they fundamentally threaten my freedom. They make me into an object. They define me in ways I can’t control. They steal my world and make me peripheral in it.

God as the ultimate Other

Sartre notes that God is this Other pushed to the limit. God would be an all-seeing consciousness that transforms me completely into an object, that knows me totally and therefore defines me totally. Under God’s gaze, I would have no freedom left. I would be purely what God sees me to be.

This is one reason Sartre rejects the existence of God. Not primarily for epistemological reasons (lack of evidence), but for ontological and ethical reasons. If God existed, human freedom would be impossible, according to Sartre. We would be objects through and through, defined by an external consciousness we could never escape.

Let me bring this all together. Or at least try. Sartre’s philosophy rests on a few fundamental claims:

First, consciousness is intentional—always directed at something beyond itself. It’s not a container of mental contents but a pure directedness toward the world.

Second, consciousness is nothingness, in this sense: it has no essence, no determinate nature. It’s pure openness, pure possibility. This is why existence precedes essence—we exist first as pure possibility, and only then do we define ourselves through our choices.

Third, we are radically free. This freedom isn’t something we possess—it’s what we are. We can’t escape it. We’re condemned to be free. Even when we try to deny our freedom, even when we’re in bad faith, we’re still freely choosing that denial.

Fourth, we’re radically responsible. Because we’re free, we’re responsible for everything we do, everything we are. We can’t blame our circumstances, our past, our nature, or other people. We make ourselves through our choices.

Fifth, other people pose a fundamental threat to our freedom. Through the look, they transform us into objects. They give us a nature, a definition, that we didn’t choose. Yet we’re still responsible for how we respond to being-seen. We can’t escape being-for-others, but we can choose how to relate to it.

This is a demanding philosophy.

It offers no consolations, no excuses, no escape from freedom and responsibility. We might wish we were simply things, with fixed natures and no choices to make. We might wish we could blame our circumstances or other people for who we are. We might wish God existed to give our lives meaning and purpose from outside.

But for Sartre, all these wishes are forms of bad faith. They’re attempts to deny what we fundamentally are: free, self-creating beings thrown into a world we didn’t choose, forced to make ourselves through our choices, bearing full responsibility for who we become.

The self is always a unity, and that unity is accounted for by the ontological structure of consciousness. Even when there’s self-deception, even when the world seems to determine our actions, even when others constitute our world—we remain fully responsible for being ourselves.

This is both terrifying and liberating. Terrifying because we can’t escape responsibility. There’s no higher authority to appeal to, no fixed nature to fall back on, no excuses that will work. But liberating because it means we’re never trapped. No matter what’s happened to us, no matter what situation we’re in, we’re always free to choose how we respond, how we project ourselves into the future, who we make ourselves to be.

Sartre tried to combine insights from Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard into a coherent philosophical vision. Raymond Aron thought you couldn’t be a follower of Kierkegaard and Marx simultaneously. But Sartre believed you could, that individual freedom and social commitment could be reconciled. I’m inclined to agree with Sartre.

Steven Crowell, “Sartre’s Existentialism and the Nature of Consciousness,” in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. Steven Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)..

Sartre, “Existentialism,” and “Being and Nothingness,” in Basic Writings of Existentialism.