Webber - Rethinking Existentialsim Chapter 1

What Is Existentialism?
Rethinking Existentialism
Jonathan Webber
Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198735908
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198735908.001.0001
Jonathan Webber
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198735908.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

Articles and books on existentialism generally eschew precise philosophical
definition of their subject matter and disagree with one another over which
ideas, issues, and thinkers should be classified as existentialist. This loose
categorization distorts readings of the texts that are claimed to fall under it. This
book argues for a precise conceptualization of existentialism grounded in the
definition it was given by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre when the
term was first popularized. Existentialism is therefore defined as the ethical
theory that we ought to treat the freedom at the core of human existence as
intrinsically valuable and the foundation of all other values. This chapter argues
for the need for a clear definition and presents an overview of how the book
develops its analysis.
Keywords: existentialism, ethics, psychoanalysis, Beauvoir, Fanon, Sartre
When the term ‘existentialism’ became popular across the arts and culture of the
Western world in the aftermath of the Second World War, it was defined by its
most prominent exponents as a substantive philosophical position. But articles
and books on existentialism written in English ever since have eschewed precise
philosophical definition, instead identifying it loosely as a movement of thinkers
concerned with certain questions and to some extent providing similar answers.
These works disagree over which questions and which thinkers to include, which
makes it difficult to see why there is thought to be any genuine movement here
at all. Categorizing diverse thinkers together in this way, moreover, has distorted
the reception of their ideas by foregrounding superficial similarities at the
expense of deeper disagreements and features that do not easily fit this
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classification. This is why scholars specializing in a particular thinker who is

regularly classified as existentialist often reject that classification, as indeed
have some of those thinkers themselves.
Although there are good historical reasons for this divergence of writings about
existentialism from the substantive philosophical definition set out at its
inception, these reasons do not provide any theoretical justification for
preserving this divergence. In this book, we will recover and delineate a sharper
and more fruitful understanding of existentialism by returning to that original
definition and using it to analyse the works it describes. This allows us to
identify a range of new contributions that classical existentialism can make to
the theoretical models currently being developed and deployed in social
psychology, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, cultural theory, and
psychotherapy, and conversely to release the potential for each of these areas of
inquiry to enrich one another by refining this existentialist perspective.
As originally defined by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism

is the ethical theory that we ought to treat the freedom at (p.2) the core of
human existence as intrinsically valuable and the foundation of all other values.
It is grounded in a theory of what it is to be human that Sartre summarized in
the slogan ‘existence precedes essence’. One central aim of this book is to argue
that Beauvoir and Sartre did not agree on the details of this theory when they
first defined existentialism in 1945 and that by 1952 Sartre had found good
reason to adopt Beauvoir’s position. This agreed theory of freedom is therefore
the canonical existentialist understanding of human existence. A second central
aim is to argue that the ethical theory built on this theory of human being holds
there to be both a moral imperative and strong eudaimonist reasons to respect
human freedom. This conception of existentialism will be sketched in more detail
across the first five sections of this chapter, before we return to its relation to
the loose category usually found in articles and books on existentialism and the
advantages of this sharper conception of existentialism.
1.1 Existence Precedes Essence

Beauvoir and Sartre gave the term ‘existentialism’ its first clear definition in
autumn 1945, during a sustained campaign of public talks, interviews, and
articles designed to promote their shared philosophy and influence the new
cultural and political shape of post-war France, a campaign Beauvoir later
described as ‘the existentialist offensive’ (FC: 46).1 Sartre gave his version of
this definition in his public lecture ‘Existentialism Is A Humanism’, subsequently
published as a book. Beauvoir gave hers in ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’,
an article in the third issue of the journal Les Temps Modernes, of which they
were both founding editors. Sartre’s lecture was delivered off the cuff in a
chaotic situation, which is perhaps why he manages to confuse his core message
with the apparently incoherent set of claims that there are Christian
existentialists, existentialism is a form of atheism, and it does not matter for
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existentialists whether God exists (EH: 20, 27–30, 53–4). Beauvoir’s article is
more (p.3) carefully considered and composed. But it was overshadowed by
Sartre’s lecture, partly because Sartre was already a major literary and
philosophical figure by the time it was delivered whereas Beauvoir was not yet.
Sartre’s use of a series of memorable images and phrases is perhaps also why
his lecture had the greater impact. His slogan ‘existence precedes essence’ is
intended to convey the idea that a human being has no inbuilt essence, no innate
or fixed personality, but instead creates their essence, or their character and
outlook, through the values and projects they choose to adopt (EH: 22).
Beauvoir, by contrast, presents the same claim without any handy soundbite to
summarize it (EPW: 211–13). Sartre’s slogan, however, can seem paradoxical.
For if this is indeed the defining feature of human being, then it might seem to
be an essence that already defines any person prior to their adopting any values
or projects. It seems contradictory, moreover, to claim that any qualities of a
person resulting from their own undertakings could be essential to that person,
given that the person is thereby claimed to have existed without those qualities.
These difficulties can be dispelled by distinguishing different senses of the term

‘essence’. In one sense of the term, the essence of a kind of thing is the set of
properties necessary for an item to be that kind of thing. One might argue, for
example, that a specific chemical composition is essential to water, so that
nothing could be a sample of water unless it had that chemical composition. In a
closely related sense, the essence of a particular item is the set of properties
without which that item could not exist. It has been argued, for example, that it
is essential to a particular person that they are the product of a specific act of
conception, such that the very same person could not have been conceived by
different parents or on a different occasion (Kripke 1980: 112–13). But neither of
these senses captures the inherently teleological conception that Aristotle
originally developed under the name ‘to ti ên einai’, a phrase so obscure that his
Roman translators invented the word ‘essentia’ for it to have a Latin equivalent.
In this teleological sense, an essence is the relational property of having a set of

parts ordered in such a way as to collectively perform some activity (Witt 2013).
A house is essentially a shelter for living in, in this sense, which is why it has
walls and a roof for keeping out wind and rain, doors for entrance and exit,
windows for light, and so on. Likewise, the eye is essentially an organ for seeing,
which is why it has a retina, a lens, an optic nerve, and so on, arranged in a
specific way. Sartre is applying this (p.4) sense of ‘essence’ to human
individuals. His claim is that a person does not have an inbuilt set of values that
they are inherently structured to pursue. Rather, the values that shape a
person’s behaviour result from the choices they have made. A person’s essence
is formed of their chosen values. Moreover, this sense of ‘essence’ does not
entail that the properties it identifies are necessary features of their bearer. The
qualities that explain a particular person’s behaviour need not be necessary
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aspects of that person, so could have been adopted by that individual and could
later change.
Sartre makes it clear that his view that people do not have inbuilt essences, in
this sense of the term, entails that there is no such thing as human nature, no
inbuilt essence common among people. Humans are neither inherently selfish
nor inherently altruistic, for example. This contrasts sharply with the view of
human existence that Albert Camus develops in his philosophical and literary
writings. Camus is often classified as an existentialist despite explicitly refusing
the label in a newspaper interview during the existentialist offensive, declaring
that ‘Sartre and I hold nothing in common and refuse to be held responsible for
one another’s debts’ (IJD: 345). ‘The whole effort of German thought has been to
substitute for the notion of human nature that of human situation’, he wrote in
his notebooks soon afterwards, and ‘existentialism carries that effort even
further’, whereas ‘like the Greeks I believe in nature’ (CN: 136). Indeed, as we
will see in Chapter 2, he was already developing a theory of human nature and
its grounding of ethical value profoundly opposed to existentialism before he
even met Sartre and Beauvoir and well before the existentialist offensive.
1.2 Freedom and Sedimentation

Despite their apparent agreement during the existentialist offensive, however,
Sartre and Beauvoir disagreed profoundly about the structure of human agency
and freedom at this stage of their careers. Sartre’s version of the view that
existence precedes essence was that an individual’s outlook, the reasons for
action that they encounter and respond to in the world, depend on the values at
the heart of their projects, which have no weight or inertia of their own but are
sustained only by the agent’s continuing tacit or explicit endorsement of them.
This is his conception of ‘radical freedom’, as we will see in more detail in
Chapter 3. If an agent chooses to abandon a project, then that project (p.5) will
offer no resistance to the agent overcoming it. Projects are interwoven into a
holistic complex, however, which means that the cost of abandoning a project
may be that one needs to abandon or significantly modify many other aspects of
one’s value system. But one retains absolute freedom, according to Sartre’s
initial conception of existentialism, to do this.
Beauvoir, by contrast, understands the repeated endorsement of a project to

increase both that project’s own inertia and the influence it exerts over the
individual’s cognition. This sedimentation of projects is central to her theory of
the social conditioning of gender in The Second Sex, published a few years after
the existentialist offensive. As we will see in Chapter 4, it is also central to the
plot of her debut novel She Came To Stay, published in the same year as Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness, two years before the existentialist offensive. Indeed, the
plot of that novel dramatizes her disagreement with Sartre over the nature of
freedom: the contrast between her theory of sedimentation and his view that a
project has no inertia of its own is reflected in the attitudes of the novel’s two
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central characters to their shared life project. Beauvoir holds that freedom
consists in the ability to commit to projects that shape one’s outlook and that
sedimentation is essential to such commitment. She recognizes that projects can
become so embedded that they can be difficult to overcome, but her position
does entail the ongoing freedom to alter or reject any project through the
sedimentation of new values.
The concept of sedimentation is also central to the philosophy of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, who had been friends with Beauvoir and Sartre since they were
students together in the late 1920s (Bakewell 2016: 109–14). Their philosophical
influences and interests were so closely aligned during the subsequent two
decades that they are aptly described as ‘a phenomenological trio’ developing
their ideas through collective critical discussion (Howells 2011: 24). Merleau-
Ponty’s primary focus, however, is on the individual’s understanding of the
world, the knowledge that allows us to navigate and manipulate our
surroundings. Beauvoir and Sartre focus primarily on an individual’s
motivations, the values we endorse and the reasons for action that we encounter
as a result. Merleau-Ponty’s central conception of sedimentation is the process
by which our knowledge of our spatial environment, our social context, and our
bodily abilities becomes embedded in the intuitive understanding that we rely on
for action. This contrasts with Beauvoir’s (p.6) emphasis on the sedimentation
of the values that motivate us through shaping the reasons for action that we
experience in our environment.
Merleau-Ponty does mention, briefly and tentatively, a kind of sedimentation of

motivation. This is towards the end of his critique of Sartre’s theory of freedom
in the closing chapter of his Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945.
This critique, however, does not properly address Sartre’s theory, as we will see
in Chapter 3, partly because Merleau-Ponty does not recognize the distinction
between our experience of the meanings of items in our environment and our
experience of the reasons for action that our environment presents. The sign
that tells us to keep off the grass, to borrow one of Sartre’s famous examples,
has a linguistic meaning and in some cultural contexts may imply some sanction
if it is disobeyed. But whether it is a reason to keep off the grass, according to
Sartre, depends on one’s own values. If you value defying authority for its own
sake, you may well experience the sign as a reason to stride across the lawn. It
is perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s own focus on the sedimentation of knowledge that
leads him to mistakenly read Sartre as holding that the meanings we encounter,
rather than the reasons, are dependent on our projects.
Since existentialism is defined by the idea that existence precedes essence, the
idea that we have freedom over the values that organize our experience and so
shape our behaviour, Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of this theory of freedom means
that he is not an existentialist, despite his commitment to the philosophical
methodology of phenomenology that drives both Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s forms
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of existentialism. This is not to say that his analyses of the phenomenology of

experience have nothing to offer existentialism. To the extent to which they are
consistent with the idea of freedom over the values that shape the reasons we
encounter, existentialism could be enriched by integrating them into its
conception of the human individual. But his refusal of any metaphysical
conception of freedom as the individual’s ability to shape their own essence, as
this was defined in the previous section, classifies his overall conception of
agency as standing in opposition to existentialism, just as the idea of human
nature that Camus endorses excludes his theory of human existence from the
existentialist camp.2
(p.7) 1.3 Existentialism and the Mind

One of the interests that Beauvoir and Sartre share with Merleau-Ponty is in the
foundations of psychology. All three aim to identify the essential structures of
the mind through their phenomenological analyses. Indeed, this is the central
aim of Sartre’s philosophical publications prior to Being and Nothingness and
motivates the development of the philosophical methodology he then deploys to
develop his existentialism (Webber forthcoming). This central aspect of
existentialism is obscured by the common practice of classifying Martin
Heidegger’s Being and Time as a paradigmatic existentialist work, despite
Heidegger’s rejection of the label. For his concern in that book is ultimately with
the nature of being, which he approaches through the analysis of human being
(which he calls Dasein) that almost fills the whole work. Heidegger argues that
this investigation of human being is distinct from any empirical study of
psychology and must proceed without presuppositions grounded in
psychological vocabulary (B&T: §§ 9–10). If we see this as a paradigmatic work
of existentialism, then we are likely to conclude that existentialist concern with
the structures of human being eschews any psychological ambition.
However, once we have understood what Sartre means by the claim that
‘existence precedes essence’ it becomes clear that his analysis of the structures
of human being requires some theory of the essential structures of the mind.
Sartre does tend to avoid using the term ‘mind’, which carries connotations of
an inner realm distinct from the world (see e.g. IPPI: 5–7). But the structures of
consciousness, perception, imagination, affectivity, deliberation, and rational
motivation are central to his analysis of human being. Beauvoir’s publications of
the 1940s are likewise replete with theories of desire, emotion, perception, and
motivation. Since a person’s ‘essence’, in Sartre’s famous slogan, is the overall
structural property that explains their behaviour, it must organize the
experience of the world that motivates that behaviour. Moreover, since this (p.
8) essence consists in the person’s projects, which have values at their core, the
claimed freedom over this essence must consist in their ability to alter the values
that structure their experience of the world. The central ontological claim of
existentialism therefore requires a model of psychological functioning, with the
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difference between Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s versions of that claim requiring

different versions of this model.
The reason Heidegger gave for rejecting the label ‘existentialist’ was that the
terms ‘existentia’ and ‘essentia’ carry metaphysical connotations that derail any
serious attempt to think clearly about the ontology of human being or about
being in general, so the slogan ‘existence precedes essence’ must be rejected
(LH: 157–8). This does not reflect the outlook of Being and Time, however, which
was written two decades earlier. In that book, Heidegger does proclaim ‘the
priority of “existentia” over “essentia”’ (B&T: § 9). The resemblance between
this phrase and Sartre’s slogan is part of the reason why Heidegger is often
classified as an existentialist. But this resemblance is merely superficial.
Heidegger is not using ‘essentia’ here in the Aristotelian sense that Sartre uses
‘essence’. Rather, he means the properties necessary for something to be a
member of a specific kind: to be the kind of thing that we are is to have a
specific kind of existence, which he then describes as structured by concern
about one’s own existence. Heidegger’s phrase, therefore, is not a claim about
the motivations behind an individual’s behaviour and so does not commit him to
a model of psychological functioning.
It is because their shared theory of the ontological structure of human being

does entail a model of psychological functioning that both Sartre and Beauvoir
develop detailed critiques of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Both want to
retain some of his central insights into human development and motivation while
rejecting his theoretical framework as mistakenly mechanistic. Their forms of
psychoanalysis are not merely applied spin-offs from a purely ontological
existentialism. Rather, they explicitly develop their varieties of existentialism as
theories standing in the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition, as we will see in
Chapter 5. This is usually obscured in analyses of existentialism. This is partly
because Sartre places his argument against Freud’s theory of the unconscious
much earlier in Being and Nothingness than his more nuanced and more positive
engagement with Freud’s work more broadly. It is also partly because Beauvoir’s
work has often been read as applying existentialist theory rather than as central
to the development of that philosophy itself.
(p.9) But this relation between existentialism and Freudian psychoanalysis has
also been obscured by the tendency of French philosophers from the 1950s
onwards to endorse the broad Freudian tradition while exaggerating the
distance between their own positions and existentialism (Crowell 2012: 11–13).
Together with the absence of Freud from lists of existentialist thinkers, this has
led to existentialism being understood as an entirely separate intellectual
tradition that provides an alternative to psychoanalysis. Beauvoir and Sartre in
fact both preserve much that they find valuable in Freud’s work. Their objection
is only to his theories of the structure of the mind, which they argue are
incoherent and fail to explain the phenomena they are designed to explain. Their
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own analyses of psychological functioning are designed in part, as we will see in

Chapter 5, to explain these phenomena properly, while giving substance to the
claim that existence precedes essence.
1.4 The Influence of Other People

The disagreement between Beauvoir and Sartre over the nature of human
freedom becomes clearer and more significant when we consider the role of
other people in the formation of an individual’s essence. Beauvoir’s theory of the
sedimentation of projects affords her sophisticated account of the role that other
people’s expectations, encouragements, and admonishments play in the
development of gender, as we will see in Chapter 5. A child is effectively directed
to adopting projects that are built on the required values for their gender and
that incorporate the required understanding of gender roles. As these projects
are continually reaffirmed throughout childhood, the values and social
knowledge they enshrine become more deeply sedimented. This accounts,
according to the theory of The Second Sex, for the differences in values and
outlook found between men and women, for the widespread acceptance of
gender norms, and indeed for their perpetuation by those in whom they have
become sedimented. Each individual is able to subject this conditioning to
critical appraisal and to reject it, but its social prevalence mitigates against this.
The influence this conditioning has over a person’s cognition cannot be removed
except through another process of sedimentation.
Sartre’s initial form of existentialism precludes this account of other people’s

influence over an individual’s essence. Instead, according to this (p.10) version
of existentialism, what matters is how one responds to the views that other
people have of oneself. There are three possible responses. One is to affirm one’s
fundamental freedom, thereby resisting the idea that another person has
correctly identified some fixed personality trait that one has. Sartre considers
this response of authenticity to be rare. The other two responses are more
common, he claims, and are both forms of bad faith. One is to accept the other
person’s view of oneself as correctly identifying some fixed personality trait that
one has. But this is not satisfactory if the other person’s view of oneself conflicts
with one’s own. The other is to deny that one possesses this trait by instead
affirming some contrary fixed personality trait. But this leads to a conflict
between one’s self-image and the image of oneself that other people express. It
is this view that the project of denying one’s freedom over one’s essence
ineluctably produces conflict that Sartre summarizes in his famous line that
‘Hell is … other people!’ (HC: 223), as we will see in Chapter 6.
Beauvoir’s theory of sedimentation provides a clear explanation of how specific

values can become prevalent among an identifiable cultural group, such as
women or men. Sartre’s theory, however, cannot provide such an explanation.
This failure is demonstrated, as we will see in Chapter 7, in his attempt to
explain the origins of Jewish culture through this theory in his book Anti-Semite
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and Jew, written at the time of the existentialist offensive. The central values of
Jewish culture, he argues in that book, are a response to a climate of anti-
Semitic hostility. This hostility takes the form of a thoroughly negative image of a
fixed Jewish personality. The authentic response of affirming one’s own freedom
is rare, argues Sartre, though he does not say why. The usual response, he
thinks, is to affirm fixed personality traits that are contrary to the anti-Semite’s
image of Jewishness. This is a form of bad faith, since it asserts a fixed
personality. The values common among Jewish people, argues Sartre, are those
endorsed as though they were a fixed Jewish nature, the values that are directly
contrary to the anti-Semite’s image of Jewish people.
Much has been written about the shortcomings of this as a theory of the origins
of Jewish culture, or indeed of any culture. One central failure of the theory is
indicative of a deep problem with Sartre’s initial form of existentialism. This is
the failure to explain why authenticity is rare and bad faith is widespread. After
all, if this is true then it too is a cultural phenomenon that stands in need of
explanation and Sartre’s theory has (p.11) no resources to explain it. Sartre’s
initial form of existentialism can ground a cultural theory, therefore, only on the
basis of this unexplainable coincidence. It seems to be for this reason, as we will
see in Chapter 7, that Sartre soon abandoned his initial form of existentialism
and adopted Beauvoir’s theory of the sedimentation of projects. By the time he
wrote Saint Genet, first published in 1952, he had accepted her view that
projects increase in inertia and influence as they continue to be endorsed. This
is the theory he employs to explain the formation of Genet’s character and
aesthetic taste.
In the same year, Frantz Fanon published his Black Skin, White Masks, which
argues that racial identity is formed through the sedimentation of projects, that
there are no genuinely fixed personality traits of individuals, and that the
problems of racism can be overcome only by gradually overcoming those
sedimented projects and removing the social structures conducive to them. This
is, as we will see in Chapter 8, a profoundly existentialist work. Fanon’s theory of
racialization has much in common with Beauvoir’s theory of gender. Fanon does
not seem to have read Beauvoir, but does develop his theory through critical
analysis of Sartre’s initial form of existentialism, alongside many other
influences. We should accept, therefore, that this theory common to Beauvoir,
Sartre, and Fanon in 1952, according to which an individual’s Aristotelian
essence is formed through the sedimentation of their projects chosen in their
specific social environment, is the canonical form of the theory that existence
precedes essence.
1.5 Existentialism Is A Humanism

Existentialism is more than that metaphysical and psychological theory, however.
Existentialism is the ethical theory that we ought to treat this structure of
human existence as intrinsically valuable and as the foundation of all other
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values. This is what Sartre means by calling existentialism a form of humanism

(EH: 51–3). The virtue of authenticity is this respect for the structure of human
agency. The existentialist claim that the reasons we experience in the world are
dependent on values we endorse and could replace has often been taken to
preclude any objective ethics. After all, what objective reason could there be to
adopt some specific value if all reasons are grounded in values that are already
endorsed? But this thought is too quick. There are two potential answers (p.12)
that can be drawn from the history of moral philosophy. One is the Aristotelian
eudaimonist answer that some evaluative outlooks are conducive to one’s own
flourishing whereas others are not. The other is the Kantian answer that the
very structure of human agency as pursuing values endorsed by the agent
entails the imperative to respect that structure of agency as objectively
intrinsically valuable. Varieties of both answers can be found in the works of
Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon during the existentialist heyday.
One kind of existentialist eudaimonist argument for authenticity concerns the

significance of one’s own projects. If there are no objective values, then the
values that we build our lives around, the ones at the core of our projects, are
not genuinely valuable at all. Although this thought might seem to lead to the
nihilist view that nothing really matters at all, the existentialist conception of
human being entails that nihilism cannot really be accepted. For our existence
just is one of pursuing projects with values at their core. What the lack of
objective value would ground, according to existentialism, is absurdity: the
inescapable pursuit of some set of values that do not really matter. Anxiety is the
recognition that the commitments that I have built my life around have their
significance for me only because I endorse them. In one form, argues Sartre, this
sense of the absurdity of our projects can lead to a debilitating despair. From the
perspective of authenticity, however, my projects are genuinely valuable as
expressions of the structure of human existence, so long as they are consistent
with respecting that structure as objectively valuable. Authenticity, therefore,
precludes this absurdity, anxiety, and despair.
A second kind of existentialist eudaimonist argument for authenticity concerns

the effects of bad faith on one’s self-image and relations with other people.
Fanon’s analysis of the alienation caused by racialization suggests an argument
of this kind. The idea that some groups of people are naturally superior and
others naturally inferior requires that people have fixed personalities, or
natures. Internalizing the idea of natural superiority and inferiority causes not
only the public problems of racial discrimination, but also the more private
problems of self-loathing that are central to Fanon’s analysis. Authenticity
therefore precludes these problematic ideas of race. Sartre argues for the
similar, though more general, conclusion that the assumption that people have
fixed personalities necessarily poisons our relations with one another, as we are
inevitably threatened by any dissonance between our self-image and (p.13) the
image of ourselves that other people express. But this is threatening only if we
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see these images as competing accounts of our fixed personality structures, he

argues, so authenticity removes this structure of conflict from our interpersonal
relations.
These eudaimonist arguments, as we will see in Chapter 9, are insufficient to

establish that we all ought to adopt the virtue of authenticity. Their
considerations in favour of authenticity are not overriding, but may be
outweighed by competing considerations grounded in an agent’s existing
projects. Anxiety, despair, alienation, or interpersonal conflict may simply be
prices worth paying, according to a particular agent’s overall value system, for
outcomes that would have to be forgone were they to embrace authenticity.
Moreover, these eudaimonist arguments seem only to support the conclusion
that we should recognize that existence precedes essence. Not one of them
seems to support the further conclusion that we should respect this structure of
human existence. Indeed, we might be all the more effective at oppressing other
people if we have a better understanding of them. These are ethical arguments
in the broad sense of ‘ethical’, therefore, which labels the concern with how best
to live our lives. But they do not support the claim that we are morally required
to accept that existence precedes essence. Still less do they place any moral
restrictions on behaviour beyond accepting this.
Beauvoir does argue for the strictly moral imperative to recognize and respect
the structure of human existence irrespective of our prior commitments across
her short book Pyrrhus and Cineas, published in 1944. Her argument aims to
derive this imperative from the structure of human existence itself. In this
regard, it resembles Immanuel Kant’s argument across his Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals that the structure of human agency entails the imperative
to treat human agency itself as objectively valuable. Beauvoir’s argument,
however, does not rely on the conception of rationality or the related
metaphysical system that Kant’s argument relies on. Instead, her argument aims
to derive the imperative of authenticity from an opening premise which,
according to the theory that existence precedes essence, everyone must accept.
This is the premise that some ends are valuable. Beauvoir’s sophisticated
argument cannot be summarized easily. But, as we will see in Chapter 10, it
deserves serious consideration in contemporary moral philosophy. That it has
not been identified before is perhaps partly due to the (p.14) tendency to read
thinkers classified as ‘existentialist’ focusing on their perceived shared interests
and ideas while Kant is not included in that classification.
1.6 Existentialism and Existential Philosophy

Classical existentialism, therefore, is the theory that existence precedes essence
and that we ought to treat this structure of human being as intrinsically valuable
and the foundation of other values. In its canonical form, the claim that
existence precedes essence is the view that an individual’s behaviour is to be
explained through the set of projects that they have pursued and that have
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become sedimented. The requirement to treat this as intrinsically valuable and

the foundation of other values could be grounded in eudaimonist ethical
considerations or in a categorical moral imperative, which are not mutually
exclusive grounds. The canonical works of existentialism are therefore
Beauvoir’s works up to the early 1950s, Sartre’s position in Saint Genet, and
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, though Sartre’s earlier works should also be
classified as a variety of existentialism. Other theories of human behaviour
should be classified as forms of existentialism only if, or only to the extent that,
they agree with this ethical theory or either version of the ontology of human
existence that it is grounded in. This is true of later works by Beauvoir, Sartre,
and Fanon, as well as works by other authors or by artists.
As we have already seen, this requires excluding Heidegger and Camus from the
category of existentialist thinkers. Since these two are almost always included in
that category despite their protestations, this might seem unacceptably
revisionary. We should first consider, however, exactly why they were included in
the loosely identified category of existentialism in the first place. It seems that
there were two pressures that led to existentialism being defined in that way.
One is that Beauvoir and Sartre began the trend of classifying other thinkers as
existentialists despite those other thinkers never having identified themselves as
such. Beauvoir and Sartre did this, moreover, in the very works in which they
defined existentialism during the existentialist offensive. Beauvoir cites Camus
approvingly, for example, though stops short of explicitly calling him an
existentialist (EPW: 209; see also P&C: 92–3). Sartre does explicitly classify
Heidegger as an existentialist (EH: 20).
(p.15) The other pressure was the general hostility to European thought in
post-war anglophone philosophy (Barrett 1958: ch. 1). At the same time,
existentialism enjoyed huge cultural popularity (McBride 2012). In this climate,
categorizing diverse European thinkers together in courses entitled
‘existentialism’ was an important strategy for getting their works analysed and
applied at all. Two anthologies set the curriculum for such courses. Walter
Kaufman’s introduction to his anthology described existentialism as ‘not a
philosophy but a label for a set of widely differing revolts against philosophy’
and ‘not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets’ (1956: 11).
Robert Solomon ended the introduction to his anthology by claiming that
‘nothing could be further from the existential attitude than attempts to define
existentialism, except perhaps a discussion about the attempts to define
existentialism’ (1974: xix). These comments might appear to disavow any unity
to each anthology, but they only strictly deny any shared substantive claims or
theoretical methods.3
What these anthologies gather together are works with a certain set of
philosophical interests, ones that were being sidelined by anglophone philosophy
in those decades. The same set of philosophical interests justifies Beauvoir and
Page 12 of 17
Sartre in identifying various thinkers as fellow travellers, despite those thinkers

not subscribing to the theory that existence precedes essence. This set of
interests, moreover, is aptly described collectively as existential inquiry. This is
an interest in analysing the structures of the specific kind of existence that
humans enjoy, (p.16) which is taken to differ from the kind of existence had by
other natural objects and by artefacts. Indeed, it was Heidegger more than
anyone else who had made this a central philosophical inquiry in European
thought by the time of the existentialist offensive. In identifying this
philosophical focus, he reserved the term ‘existence’ (existenz) for the kind of
being had by humans and coined the term ‘existentialia’ (Existenziale) as a
collective term for the structures of this kind of being (B&T: § 9). These
structures include embodiment, location in a material environment, position in a
social realm, the sense of one’s own mortality, and inherent temporality.4
It was Heidegger’s ‘existential analytic of Dasein’ developed across Being and

Time that brought the idea of existential philosophy, the analysis of the various
existentialia and the relations between them, into the centre of European
thought in the first half of the twentieth century. But this is not to say that
existential thought had been invented at this time. Careful attention has been
paid to the structures of human life by secular and religious thinkers, and
occasionally movements, at various times and places in the history of Western
thought. Writers identified by Beauvoir and Sartre as fellow travellers and those
anthologized by Kaufman and Solomon have been existential thinkers in this
sense. If all that is required to count as an existential thinker is that one’s work
analyses some dimension of human being, then there have been a great many
existential thinkers. If we use the term more narrowly to describe thinkers
aiming to produce systematic philosophical understandings of human existence,
then far fewer thinkers qualify. Either way, Kierkegaard and Heidegger are
landmark figures.
1.7 Rethinking Existentialism

It is very unfortunate, therefore, that the terms ‘existentialist’ and ‘existential’
are so often used interchangeably. Existentialism is an ethical theory that rests
on a substantive and sophisticated existential philosophy. (p.17) It is a theory
of how best to live that rests on a specific analysis of the distinctive structures of
human existence. The pressures that led to the conflation of these two terms no
longer apply. The philosophies of Beauvoir and Sartre are now sufficiently
articulated and substantiated that there is no need to rely on their occasional
agreements with other existential theories to explain or argue for them. The
anthologies edited by Kaufman and Solomon enabled the growth of anglophone
scholarship of European philosophy, which has developed to the point where it
no longer has anything to gain from the loose categorization established by
those anthologies. To continue to categorize that set of thinkers together as
existentialists can now only distort our understanding of them, masking deep
Page 13 of 17
differences behind superficial similarities and occluding each thinker’s specific

influences and ambitions.5
We should instead rethink existentialism by returning to its original definition,

the one that Beauvoir and Sartre offered during the existentialist offensive. This
facilitates a sharper focus on the philosophical theories that defined the term. It
brings into perspective a range of psychological aspects of the existentialism of
Beauvoir and Sartre that are at least rare in the field of existential philosophy. It
affords, for example, a clearer view of Freud’s influence on the development of
existentialism, an influence generally occluded by the standard practice of
contrasting Freudian psychoanalysis with existential theory.6 And (p.18) it
brings into clear relief the difference between Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s versions
of existentialism at the time of the existentialist offensive and the reasons for
Sartre’s eventual adoption of Beauvoir’s version. This in turn allows us to
identify the underlying theoretical unity of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,
which has previously seemed to vacillate between existential philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and cultural theory. Once we have a clear view of the unity of
these forms of inquiry within the existentialism that Beauvoir and Sartre agree
upon by 1952, that is, we can see that Fanon’s book published that year is also a
work of existentialism.
This rethinking also brings into clearer view the status of existentialism as an
ethical theory. For ethics is not an essential aspect of existential philosophy
itself. Iris Murdoch’s comment that Sartre’s biography of Genet is a work of
ethics in ‘paradoxical guise’ is instructive (1957: 676). For this is paradoxical
only if we expect ethics to provide moral constraints and prescriptions. We
would then be at least surprised to find a work on ethics detailing the life of a
professional thief. But as the broader concern with how best to live, ethics
necessarily involves clarification of how people develop the commitments,
preferences, tastes, and other characteristics that shape their lives. The
development of existentialist psychoanalysis is therefore integral to the ethical
programme of existentialism. But this does not mean that existentialism eschews
the idea of morality. Focusing on the works of Beauvoir and Sartre of this era as
equally expressive of existentialism allows us to see that Sartre’s comments in
Existentialism Is A Humanism endorsing an imperative of authenticity that does
not reflect any of his own works are best understood as referring to the Kantian
moral argument of Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus and Cineas, published the previous year.
The advantages of abandoning the old loose category of existential thinkers in

favour of a clear focus on the works that first defined existentialism are not
limited, however, to sharpening our understanding of those works and their
development. For the aspects of these works that have been obscured by this
broader categorization contain insightful analyses that can make useful
contributions to current theoretical debates. A wide range of research in
empirical psychology is currently converging on the idea that evaluative
Page 14 of 17
attitudes, individual goals, and ways of classifying individuals become gradually

more firmly embedded in a person’s cognitive system as they are repeatedly
used, increasing (p.19) their influence over that person’s thought and
behaviour. The central existentialist idea of sedimentation establishes a useful
perspective on this process, its role in the development of personal character,
and the problems caused by unendorsed biases and stereotypes. Together with
the existentialist arguments for the virtue of authenticity, this theory of human
being can ground sophisticated contributions to social psychology, philosophy of
mind, moral philosophy, cultural theory, and psychotherapy, as we will see in
Chapter 11.
For this reason, the analysis of existentialism across this book is resolutely
philosophical rather than historical or biographical. It is concerned with
identifying and assessing the philosophical arguments published across a ten-
year period, 1942–52. These analyses will show why Camus and Merleau-Ponty
are not existentialists, though they are both existential thinkers, and will thereby
clarify existentialism itself and identify the deep reasons for the bitter political
disputes that famously ended each of their friendships with Beauvoir and Sartre.
These chapters will clarify the Freudian influence on existentialism, the reasons
why Sartre abandoned his initial version of existentialism in favour of
Beauvoir’s, and the underlying existentialist unity of Fanon’s analysis of
racialization. They will identify existentialism’s central eudaimonist arguments
for the virtue of authenticity and their limitations before detailing Beauvoir’s
argument for a categorical moral imperative of authenticity. These analyses have
all already been sketched in this chapter. But their details are essential if they
are to make significant contributions to current debates about ethics and the
mind. So they are articulated more precisely across the next nine chapters,
before a final chapter indicates some potential contributions they could make to
current thought.
Notes:
(1) Works by Beauvoir, Camus, Fanon, Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and
Sartre are indicated by title abbreviations rather than dates, to avoid confusion
between first publication and edition used. Full details are given in the
Bibliography by surname and abbreviation, listed for each author in order of first
publication. All other works are cited in the usual way, by publication date of
edition used.
(2) Throughout this book, I use the term ‘metaphysical’ interchangeably with
‘ontological’ to describe anything pertaining to the structures of being. Thus,
metaphysical freedom is the freedom that existentialists consider human agents
to have over their own being, their ability to shape their own essence. This is
despite the distinction that Sartre draws towards the end of Being and
Nothingness between ‘ontology’ as the analysis of the structures of being and
‘metaphysics’ as the study of the aetiology of those ontological structures, a
Page 15 of 17
study which he declares that he has not undertaken (B&N: 639). So far as I
know, Sartre’s definition of ‘metaphysics’ here is entirely idiosyncratic. My use
in this book is normal in contemporary anglophone philosophy.
(3) The anthologies cement an already existing tendency, which had been begun
by Beauvoir and Sartre in referring to other thinkers in their descriptions of
existentialism (see e.g. Blackham 1952). Their editors’ comments are then
echoed in the ideas that existentialism is defined by ‘opposition to the
philosophical tradition’ (Dreyfus 2006: 137), cannot be clearly and objectively
defined because it is opposed to the traditional philosophical aim of providing
such definitions (Macquarrie 1972: 13; Earnshaw 2006: 1–2), comprises no
substantive tenets but only a set of interactions between thinkers addressing
certain concerns (Grimsley 1960: 1–11; Reynolds 2006: 2–3), and can be
understood only as a ‘family resemblance’ category (Warnock 1967: 1–2;
Macquarrie 1972: 14–18; Flynn 2006: 8; Joseph et al. 2011: 3–4). David E.
Cooper offers a rare substantive definition of existentialism as those
philosophical views of Heidegger and Sartre found regularly among the
existentialist family (1990: 6–10; 2012: 28–30). All these characterizations result
in some way from attempting to discern common ideas of thinkers already
identified as existentialists. If the arguments of this book are right, there is now
much to be gained by distinguishing the broad existential inquiry in which these
thinkers are all engaged from the substantive theory that provided the original
definition of existentialism.
(4) Heidegger did not invent this restricted concept of existence. Søren
Kierkegaard had used the Danish word ‘existenz’ in this way almost a century
earlier. Karl Jaspers had used the term in a related way, to label the kind of
being that he recommends that we adopt, a few years before Heidegger
published Being and Time. But neither Kierkegaard nor Jaspers was particularly
influential on European thought until after Heidegger had established the idea
of existential philosophy.
(5) Jeff Malpas (2012: 293) also argues that we should distinguish between
‘existential’ and ‘existentialist’. But he assumes that ‘existential’ should be used
in its ordinary English sense, which pertains to anything at all that there is,
instead of identifying the specific meaning with which it is used by Kierkegaard
and Heidegger. As a result, he uses ‘existentialist’ to refer to the concern with
the structures of human existence, leaving him with no term for the substantive
ethical theory that Beauvoir and Sartre articulated as the original definition of
‘existentialism’.
(6) Two further influences on this aspect of existentialism that have been
occluded by the focus on the loose category of existential thought are ancient
Stoicism and seventeenth-century French philosophy. Beauvoir and Sartre both
cite Stoic philosophers regularly. In a magazine portrait of Sartre published as
Page 16 of 17
part of the existentialist offensive, Beauvoir compares his philosophy to that of

‘the Stoics of old whose ethics he loves’ (JPS: 231). Yet this influence on
existentialism has received only scant critical attention. The influence of early
modern French thought on Sartre and Beauvoir has recently been highlighted by
Kate Kirkpatrick (2017: 48–73) and Susan James (2003) respectively.
Kirkpatrick’s close attention to Sartre’s student curriculum grounds her
innovative analysis of the French theological influences on his existentialism.
Further use of Kirkpatrick’s approach could well draw out a significant degree of
influence of the central interests and conceptual repertoire of modern French
philosophy and literature on the development of existentialism more generally.
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What Is Existentialism?

Print publication date: 2018

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: existentialism, ethics, psychoanalysis, Beauvoir, Fanon, Sartre

classification. This is why scholars specializing in a particular thinker who is

As originally defined by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism

1.1 Existence Precedes Essence

These difficulties can be dispelled by distinguishing different senses of the term

In this teleological sense, an essence is the relational property of having a set of

1.2 Freedom and Sedimentation

Beauvoir, by contrast, understands the repeated endorsement of a project to

The concept of sedimentation is also central to the philosophy of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty does mention, briefly and tentatively, a kind of sedimentation of

of existentialism. This is not to say that his analyses of the phenomenology of

(p.7) 1.3 Existentialism and the Mind

difference between Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s versions of that claim requiring

It is because their shared theory of the ontological structure of human being

own analyses of psychological functioning are designed in part, as we will see in

1.4 The Influence of Other People

Sartre’s initial form of existentialism precludes this account of other people’s

Beauvoir’s theory of sedimentation provides a clear explanation of how specific

1.5 Existentialism Is A Humanism

values. This is what Sartre means by calling existentialism a form of humanism

One kind of existentialist eudaimonist argument for authenticity concerns the

A second kind of existentialist eudaimonist argument for authenticity concerns

see these images as competing accounts of our fixed personality structures, he

These eudaimonist arguments, as we will see in Chapter 9, are insufficient to

1.6 Existentialism and Existential Philosophy

become sedimented. The requirement to treat this as intrinsically valuable and

Sartre in identifying various thinkers as fellow travellers, despite those thinkers

It was Heidegger’s ‘existential analytic of Dasein’ developed across Being and

1.7 Rethinking Existentialism

differences behind superficial similarities and occluding each thinker’s specific

We should instead rethink existentialism by returning to its original definition,

The advantages of abandoning the old loose category of existential thinkers in

attitudes, individual goals, and ways of classifying individuals become gradually

part of the existentialist offensive, Beauvoir compares his philosophy to that of

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