Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) met as students in Paris in 1929 and remained lifelong partners and collaborators, though they never married. Together they made existentialism a public movement in the cafés, theaters and journals of postwar Paris.
Radical freedom
In Being and Nothingness (1943) and his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre argued that because there is no God to design human nature, we are wholly free and wholly responsible for what we make of ourselves. In his memorable image, we are sentenced to freedom: we did not choose to be free, yet we cannot escape choosing. Even refusing to decide is a decision.
Sartre told of a student who came to him during the occupation, torn between joining the Free French forces and staying to care for his mother. No moral theory could settle it; Sartre's only advice was that the student was free and must choose, which is to say invent. In choosing, Sartre added, we also choose an image of what a human being should be, as though legislating for everyone.
Bad faith
Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre's name for lying to ourselves about our freedom. His most famous example is a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise and eager. He plays at being a waiter as if it were his fixed nature, trying to be a waiter the way an inkwell is an inkwell, in order to escape the anxiety of being free. Another example is a woman on a date who leaves her hand in her companion's while pretending not to notice, treating herself as a mere thing so as not to decide. Saying “I can't help it, that's just who I am” is bad faith. So is the opposite move: pretending to be pure freedom, as if the facts of one's past and situation did not count at all.
The look
Sartre also explored our relations with others through the look. Imagine peering through a keyhole, absorbed in what you see. Suddenly you hear footsteps and realize someone is watching you. You feel shame: under another's gaze you become an object, defined from outside. Sartre thought human relationships are marked by this struggle between seeing and being seen. His play No Exit (1944) shows three people trapped together after death who discover that hell needs no torturers; their gaze on one another is torment enough.
De Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity
De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) answered critics who said existentialism could ground no ethics. Human beings are ambiguous: we are free subjects and also bodies and objects in the world, mortal and limited. Morality begins by accepting this rather than fleeing it. Her key claim is that my freedom requires the freedom of others. To will oneself free is also to will others free, since our projects only have meaning in a world shared with other free people. Oppression is therefore wrong at its root, because it denies others the open future that gives one's own life its point.
The Second Sex
In The Second Sex (1949) de Beauvoir applied these ideas to women. Her most famous line says, in effect, that a person is not born a woman but becomes one: womanhood as a social role is shaped by upbringing, custom and expectation, not fixed by nature. Men had cast themselves as the Subject, the human norm, and women as the Other, defined in relation to men. Women were then encouraged to accept this position as natural, which de Beauvoir saw as a kind of imposed bad faith. The book became a founding text of modern feminism.
Worked example: the layoff meeting
Priya is a mid-level manager told to lay off three people on her team. Watch the different ways she might handle it, using this level's ideas.
Bad faith, version one. Priya tells the employees, “I had no choice; I'm just following orders.” Sartre would say this is bad faith. She did have choices: how to deliver the news, whether to argue for alternatives, whether to stay in a role that requires such acts. Treating herself as a mere cog lets her escape the anxiety of responsibility.
Bad faith, version two. Alternatively, Priya tells herself she could simply walk away from everything tomorrow, as if her mortgage, her children and her contract did not count. This denies the facts of her situation. Sartre's account cuts both ways: we are free, but always free in a situation.
The look. In the meeting, Priya feels the eyes of the three employees on her. Under their gaze she becomes, for them, “the one who fired us.” She cannot fully control how she is defined from outside, and she feels the shame Sartre described.
De Beauvoir's lens. De Beauvoir would ask Priya to consider the freedom of others as bound up with her own. Has she treated the employees as people with open futures, or as numbers? She might press for severance, references and time to find new work. These acts do not remove the harm, but they acknowledge others' freedom.
The example shows that existentialist ideas are not only about private self-discovery. They bear directly on how we act toward others when we hold some power over them.