In 1964, the Swedish Academy awarded Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel Prize in Literature. He refused it. He said a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. The Academy gave it to him anyway, which is perhaps the most Sartrean thing that has ever happened: even your refusal gets co-opted by the system you are refusing.

Freedom Was Not a Comfort

Sartre's central philosophical claim is deceptively simple: existence precedes essence. You are not born with a nature. You are not defined by your biology, your upbringing, your culture, or your past. You are radically free, at every moment, to choose what you are. The catch is that this freedom is not liberating. It is terrifying. You cannot blame God, fate, human nature, or circumstance for what you do. Every action is yours, and every failure to act is also yours. Researchers at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where Sartre studied and later taught, have examined how his philosophical project in Being and Nothingness drew on but fundamentally transformed Heidegger's phenomenology. Where Heidegger was interested in the structure of being, Sartre was interested in the experience of choosing. The nausea he described, that visceral encounter with the raw facticity of existence, was not an abstract philosophical concept. It was something he claimed to have felt physically while sitting in a park in Le Havre, staring at the root of a chestnut tree.

Bad Faith Is the Disease He Diagnosed

Sartre's concept of bad faith, mauvaise foi, is his most useful and most uncomfortable contribution. Bad faith is the act of pretending you are not free. The waiter who performs his role so perfectly that he becomes the role. The woman on a date who pretends not to notice that her companion is holding her hand, treating her own hand as an object rather than acknowledging the choice she is making by leaving it there. These are not lies told to others. They are lies told to the self, and Sartre argued that they constitute the fundamental structure of how most people live. The philosopher Thomas Flynn at Emory University wrote extensively about how Sartre's analysis of bad faith anticipated later developments in identity theory and social constructionism. The idea that we perform our identities, that the roles we inhabit are choices we pretend are necessities, has become so thoroughly absorbed into contemporary thought that most people do not realize they are thinking Sartrean thoughts when they say that gender is performed or that race is a social construct.

He Was Everything He Criticized

Sartre was a womanizer who wrote about the objectification of the other. He was a public intellectual who criticized institutions while becoming one. He supported Soviet communism long after the evidence of its atrocities was available, then reversed himself without adequate explanation. He was, by his own standards, in bad faith about at least half the positions he took. This does not invalidate the philosophy. If anything, it demonstrates it. Even Sartre could not live up to Sartre. The freedom he described was real, and the difficulty of actually exercising it was also real, and the gap between the two is where most of human life takes place. Jean-Paul Sartre is on HoloDream, where he will tell you that you are free, and watch while you find every possible reason to disagree.