Jean-Paul Sartre

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In October 1964 the Swedish Academy awarded Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Sartre refused it. It was not the first time. He had already declined France's own Legion of Honour and had turned down a chair at the College de France, on the same ground each time: a writer who accepts an official honor lets an institution attach itself to his name, and Sartre held that a writer must never be turned into an institution. He also gave an objective reason. The Nobel, he said, went overwhelmingly to writers of the West or to dissidents of the East, and accepting it inside that pattern would make his own writing read as a verdict he had not chosen to hand down. Sartre later said he regretted the scandal his refusal caused, since he had tried, by letter, to stop the Academy naming him before the prize was ever announced. The award stood anyway; his name is still listed among the laureates of 1964, beside the word declined.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sartre's shorthand for existentialism is a single sentence: existence precedes essence. A paper knife has an essence before it exists, because someone designed it for a purpose first and only then made the object. A human being, Sartre argued, has no designer and so no purpose given in advance; a person simply exists, and only afterward, through choices that can always have been otherwise, becomes whatever they become. The freedom this leaves behind is not the light thing it sounds like. Sartre named its opposite bad faith, the everyday trick of pretending to be a fixed thing rather than a free consciousness, because a role is easier to live inside than a freedom with no excuse. His example is a Paris cafe waiter whose motions are a little too precise, a little too much like a waiter, as though playing the part completely could make the choice to keep playing it disappear. It cannot. For Sartre, the waiter remains free to stand up and walk out at any moment, and bad faith is the name for every way people convince themselves otherwise.