Man Is Condemned To Be Free

From Existentialism Is a Humanism, a lecture delivered at Club Maintenant in Paris on October 29, 1945, and published in 1946. Sartre's purpose was to defend existentialism against critics who called it a pessimistic philosophy of despair. The sentence contains both halves of his argument: "condemned" because we did not choose to exist, yet "free" because without a God-given human nature there is no pre-determined essence to constrain us. Every choice we make creates not only our own identity but, in Sartre's view, implicitly proposes an image of what human beings should be — making freedom inseparable from total, inescapable responsibility.